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 Too, recent research has, to an extent, rendered them out of date, since over the past two decades nearly a score of previously uncollected stories have been unearthed, which need to be integrated within the Benson 'spook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 Face - the fourth volume in the series - covers the four year period between December 1923 and November 1927. Although Fred's output of spook stories had slowed down somewhat from the heady days of 1922/23, he was still able to turn out shiver-inducing tales of the haunting and horrific, as in the menacing 'A Tale of an Empty House', the prophetic 'Corstophine', and one of the author's most masterly tales, the terrifying 'The Face'.