This volume is a collection of thirteen essays built around the question ‘what is the supernatural, and how, and why, has it changed over time?’ It is divided into two complementary sections; the first focussing on research on the discourse of the supernatural (including the miraculous) located in the medieval and early modern eras, and the second consisting of a set of test-cases involving research on the uncanny, often articulated in a post-Freudian sense, as expressed in modern literature, film and art. The eclectic and prismatic approach pursued via a variety of test-cases of the supernatural in this book gives rise to a clear, comparative and diachronic study of the main characteristics of the supernatural.

Algernon Blackwood continues to demonstrate the power of his words as he shocks and disturbs in this collection of supernatural tales. In a world where the line between sanity and insanity becomes increasingly blurred, tales such as 'Violence' demonstrate the mind's ability to deceive itself to a horrifying end, whilst 'The Terror of the Twins' portrays the destructive power of hate from beyond the grave. In tales where a happy ending is hard to find, prepare yourself for a journey into the darkest elements of the human psyche.

Supernatural sleuths and ghostly gumshoes populate these tales of the criminally creepy. Four-time Hugo Award winner Larry Niven headlines this anthology, which also includes tales by William F. Nolan, Manly Wade Wellman, Robert Weinberg, and Ron Goulart.

This early work by Algernon Blackwood was originally published in 1920 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography as part of our Cryptofiction Classics series. 'Running Wolf' is a short story of a supernatural native American werewolf in the Canadian wilderness. Algernon Henry Blackwood was born in Shooter's Hill, South East England, in 1869. In his youth he trained as a doctor at Wellington College in Berkshire, and went on to pursue a number of careers, in areas as varied as milk farming, modelling, journalism and violin teaching. In his thirties, Blackwood returned to England from New York, where he had spent a number of years, and began to write stories of the supernatural. Blackwood was extremely prolific, producing over the course of his life some ten original collections of short stories, fourteen novels, several children's books, and a number of plays. The Cryptofiction Classics series contains a collection of wonderful stories from some of the greatest authors in the genre, including Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London. From its roots in cryptozoology, this genre features bizarre, fantastical, and often terrifying tales of mythical and legendary creatures. Whether it be giant spiders, werewolves, lake monsters, or dinosaurs, the Cryptofiction Classics series offers a fantastic introduction to the world of weird creatures in fiction.

America is haunted. Ghosts from its violent history--the genocide of Indigenous peoples, slavery, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and traumatic wars--are an inescapable and unsettled part of the nation's heritage. Not merely in the realm of metaphor but present and tangible, urgently calling for contact, these otherworldly visitors have been central to our national identity. Through times of mourning and trauma, artists have been integral to visualizing ghosts, whether national or personal, and in doing so have embraced the uncanny and the inexplicable. This stunning catalog, accompanying the first major exhibition to assess the spectral in American art, explores the numerous ways American artists have made sense of their own experiences of the paranormal and the supernatural, developing a rich visual culture of the intangible. ​Featuring artists from James McNeill Whistler and Kerry James Marshall to artist/mediums who made images with spirits during séances, this catalog covers more than two hundred years of the supernatural in American art. Here we find works that explore haunting, UFO sightings, and a broad range of experiential responses to other worldly contact.

Alek Fitz is a reaper, a collection agent who works for the supernatural elements of the world, tracking down debtors and solving problems for clients as diverse as the Lords of Hell, vampires, Haitian loa, and goblins. He’s even worked for the Tooth Fairy on occasion. Based out of Cleveland, Ohio, Alek is the best in the game. As a literal slave to his job, he doesn’t have a choice. When Death comes looking for someone to track down a thief, Alek is flung into a mess of vengeful undead, supernatural bureaucracy, and a fledgling imp war. As the consequences of failure become dire, he has few leads, and the clock is ticking. Only with the help of his friend Maggie—an ancient djinn with a complex past—can he hope to recover the stolen property, save the world, and just maybe wring a favor out of the Great Constant himself. It’s a hell of a job, but somebody’s got to do it . . .

This book illustrates how global horror film images of children re-conceptualised childhood at the beginning of the twenty-first century, unravelling the child's long entrenched binding to ideologies of growth, futurity, and progress. The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema analyses an influential body of horror films featuring subversive depictions of children that emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and considers the cultural conditions surrounding their emergence. The book proposes that complex cultural and industrial shifts at the turn of the millennium resulted in potent cinematic renegotiations of the concept of childhood. In these transnational films-largely stemming from Spain, Japan, and America-the child resists embodying growth and futurity, concepts to which the child's symbolic function is typically bound. By demonstrating both the culturally specific and globally resonant properties of these frightening visions of children who refuse to grow up, the book outlines the conceptual and aesthetic mechanisms by which long entrenched ideologies of futurity, national progress, and teleological history started to waver at the turn of the twenty-first century.

From the deeply unsettling to the possibly supernatural, these thirty-one border-crossing stories from around the world explore the uncanny in literature, and delve into our increasingly unstable sense of self, home, and planet. The Uncanny Reader: Stories from the Shadows opens with "The Sand-man," E.T.A. Hoffmann's 1817 tale of doppelgangers and automatons—a tale that inspired generations of writers and thinkers to come. Stories by 19th and 20th century masters of the uncanny—including Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Shirley Jackson—form a foundation for sixteen award-winning contemporary authors, established and new, whose work blurs the boundaries between the familiar and the unknown. These writers come from Egypt, France, Germany, Japan, Poland, Russia, Scotland, England, Sweden, the United States, Uruguay, and Zambia—although their birthplaces are not always the terrains they plumb in their stories, nor do they confine themselves to their own eras. Contemporary authors include: Chris Adrian, Aimee Bender, Kate Bernheimer, Jean-Christophe Duchon-Doris, Mansoura Ez-Eldin, Jonathon Carroll, John Herdman, Kelly Link, Steven Millhauser, Joyce Carol Oates, Yoko Ogawa, Dean Paschal, Karen Russell, Namwali Serpell, Steve Stern and Karen Tidbeck.

"This study looks at a wide range of medieval Englisih romance texts, including the works of Chaucer and Malory, from a broad cultural perspective, to show that while they employ magic in order to create exotic, escapist worlds, they are also grounded in a sense of possibility, and reflect a complex web of inherited and current ideas." --Book Jacket.

Supernatural Buchan - Stories of Ancient Spirits uncanny places and strange creatures. Buchan's stories of solid characters clad in tweeds and braving all odds armed only with a stout walking stick have become popular classics. Perhaps it is therefore no surprise that the same character types populate his highly entertaining tales of the strange and weird - here collected into a feast of supernatural delights. In a Buchan story the hauntings and other manifestations are far more subtle than the usual blood-curdling phantoms. The author brings finely crafted detail and a profound sense of the spirit of landscape (specially that of his native Scotland) and place to locales that are as disparate as the stories themselves. Whether they are acknowledged or not, ancient other-worldly creatures, deities and people intrude into Buchan's settings to influence and effect the lives of "modern" man. These wonderful tales of hidden threat and menace make dealing with the mundane concerns of our own world seem like child's play.