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 Too, recent research has, to an extent, rendered them out of date, since over the past two decades nearly a score of previously uncollected stories have been unearthed, which need to be integrated within the Benson 'spook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.

Mrs Amworth—the third volume in the series—covers the nineteen month period between April 1922 and November 1923: a period which, in weird fiction terms, was one of the most feverishly productive times in Fred's entire career, and saw the publication of such classics as 'The Horror-Horn', 'Negotium Perambulans . . .', and the title story, one of the most famous of all vampire tales.