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 their 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 Too, recent research has, to an extent, rendered them out of date, since over the past two decades nearly a score of previously uncollected stories have been unearthed, which need to be integrated within the 'spook story'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 presents all of the recently discovered weird tales from The Flint Knife (1988), and those from the 'Spook Stories' sections of Desirable Residences (1991) and Fine Feathers (1994). It also features a radical rearranging of the stories themselves into their chronological order of composition and publication.

Sea Mist—the fifth an final volume in the series—covers the period between 1927 and 1940. In addition to bringing together a further seventeen stories, the volume contains three marginal weird tales, a fascinating collection of articles in which Benson discusses such topics as J. S. Le Fanu, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, demoniacal possession, and the technique of the ghost story, and editor Jack Adrian's final thoughts about one of the foremost writers of supernatural tales of the last century.