Shark Alley: The Memoirs of a Penny-a-liner
Jack Vincent used to be famous. Now he’s a nobody, and the only job he can get is on a troopship bound for the frontier wars of colonial Africa. Jack recounts the events that have brought him to this fallen state. It is a journey that begins in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison and ends in the shark infested waters of the Western Cape and his berth on the HMS Birkenhead, the Victorian Titanic.
The Author Who Outsold Dickens
William Harrison Ainsworth (1805 – 1882) is probably the most successful Victorian writer that most people haven’t heard of. Charles Dickens’s only serious commercial rival until the late-1840s, Ainsworth commanded a massive audience until a moral panic – the ‘Newgate Controversy’ – effectively destroyed his reputation as a serious literary novelist.
The 19th Century Underworld
Take a walk on the dark side of the street in this unique exploration of the fears and desires at the heart of the British Empire, from the Regency dandy’s playground to the grim and gothic labyrinths of the Victorian city, where bare-knuckled boxers slog it out for dozens of rounds, children are worth more dead than alive, and the Thames holds more bodies than the Ganges.
Life and Works of Lancashire Novelist William Harrison Ainsworth
'A book on Ainsworth is needed ... Stephen Carver’s book offers, then to fill a gap: but more to the point, it does so excellently. The research is sound and wide-ranging, and has included the discovery of letters which were not previously known about. The arrangement of the book and the range of texts covered are equally stimulating and compelling.' - Professor David Punter.
The Wendigo and Other Weird Tales by Algernon Blackwood (Editor)
Like his occult detective ‘John Silence’, Blackwood was fascinated by elemental spirits, reincarnation, other dimensions, and higher states of consciousness. Wherever such things broke through, he sought them out, and now so can you in this comprehensive collection of his short fiction.
Man-size in Marble and Other Grim Tales by E. Nesbit (Editor)
Nesbit’s tales are short, sharp shockers, her delivery vivid, eerie, and unsettling. She wrote about what scared her: ghosts, zombies, ‘things that walk’; madness, murder, and premature burial. This edition collects all her short horror and weird fiction, reproducing her own collection Grim Tales (1893) in its entirety.
Between Two Worlds: The Weird Tales of Arthur Machen (Editor)
This collection comprises the majority of Machen’s short horror fiction, including his Decadent masterpiece The Great God Pan, his tales of the malevolent ‘Little People’ still living beneath the mountains and valleys of his native Wales, and the chilling novella The Terror.
Unveiled: The First Unthank School Anthology (Co-Editor)
The first anthology of new writing from students of the Unthank School of Writing, Norwich.