Until his death in 1918, Bernard Capes was a prolific, talented, and highly-regarded author of short stories, reviews, articles, and more than forty novels. Among his short stories were some of the most imaginative tales of terror of his era: stories of werewolves and the Wandering Jew, of lost souls and vengeful suicides, of horrors from beyond the grave which enfold the unsuspecting.

However, following his untimely death the author fell into almost total neglect, and his works were forgotten for sixty years. In 1978 Hugh Lamb began the process of resurrecting Capes's reputation when he used 'The Moon Stricken' in his aptly-titled Forgotten Tales of Terror. The following year he used two of Capes's greatest stories—'The Green Bottle' and 'An Eddy on the Floor'—in Tales from a Gas-Lit Graveyard, and the author's reputation began to grow amongst enthusiasts of the classic supernatural tale.

In 1989, Lamb edited The Black Reaper for the now-classic Equation Chillers series, thus cementing Capes's reputation as one of the best writers of weird stories in the genre. This new edition is augmented by a further eleven stories, most of which have not been seen since their original book publication more than eighty years ago. Lamb's revised introduction also makes use of new biographical information which has only recently come to light, providing the most comprehensive look available at this forgotten master of terror.