Oldstyle Tales Press

If Fitz-James O’Brien earned the distinction of the Celtic Poe, then de Maupassant is surely the Gallic Poe. “He?” is a manic marriage of elements from Poe’s doppelgänger epic, “William Wilson,” and O’Brien’s “What Was It?” The French were tremendously influenced by Poe—his writings were cherished by Baudelaire, whose translations of the American spawned a ravenous following amo...

Starting in the Autumn of 2024, I began an ambitious project: returning to every anthology in my catalogue and relaunching each one as a fully restored, expanded, and comprehensively annotated edition. Many of the earlier volumes were originally produced while I was balancing publishing alongside a full-time teaching career, which meant making difficult choices about where to de...

Throughout his career Hodgson had a taste for mystery. His very first story – “The Goddess of Death” – was not unlike The Hound of the Baskervilles: something of an Arthur Conan Doyle pastiche involving a sham haunting that is exposed Scooby-Doo-style. Later he wrote “The Terror of the Water Tank” about a series of ghostly strangulations that are ultimately deduced to be caused ...

Long before the Bermuda Triangle entered popular folklore, there was another region of the Atlantic whose reputation inspired equal measures of curiosity and dread. Unlike the tempests of Cape Horn or the ice-choked waters of the Arctic, the Sargasso Sea owed its sinister reputation not to violence but to stillness. Mariners spoke of an uncanny expanse where the winds faltered, ...

William Hope Hodgson is remembered today chiefly as one of the great architects of cosmic horror. Readers encounter him through the apocalyptic immensities of The House on the Borderland, the uncanny terrors of the Sargasso Sea stories, or the melancholy grandeur of The Night Land. Yet throughout his career another fascination repeatedly surfaced alongside his cosmic visions: th...