Although E.F. Benson's four volumes of short weird tales are acknowledged classics of their kind, original hardback editions are now difficult to obtain, and when copies are offered for sale the price is often prohibitive. Too, recent research has, to an extent, rendered them out of date, since over the past two decades nearly a score of previously uncollected stories have been unearthed, which need to be integrated within the Benson 'spook story' canon.

The Ash-Tree Press 'Collected Spook Stories', under the editorship of Jack Adrian, now brings together all of E.F. Benson's known tales of the strange and the supernatural into an extended five-volume set. This collected edition will present all the recently discovered weird tales from The Flint Knife: Further Spook Stories (1988), and those from the 'Spook Stories' sections of Desirable Residences (1991) and Fine Feathers (1994), as well as any 'new' supernatural stories which may surface in the course of further research. It will also feature a radical rearranging of the stories themselves into their chronological order of composition and publication.

The Terror by Night—the first volume in the series—covers the period between 1899 and 1911, and demonstrates Benson's early mastery of his craft, in such stories as 'Caterpillars', 'The Man Who Went Too Far', 'Gavon's Eve', and 'The Bus-Conductor', the basis for one of the stories in the classic supernatural film Dead of Night.