Following the great success of our Gothic Fantasy deluxe edition short story compilations, including Cosy Crime, Murder Mayhem and Lost Worlds, this exciting title in the series is packed with amateur detectives solving mysterious murders, suspicious butlers and terrifying encounters set in locked rooms, stately mansions, haunted castles and eerily silent libraries. This collection contains our usual mix of classic and brand new writing, with delightful tales of dastardly dealings from authors such as Wilkie Collins, Anna Katharine Green, Gaston Leroux, Edgar Wallace and Oscar Wilde. Of course, new stories from contemporary authors give a voice to new writers through our open submission windows. The modern writers chosen from submissions and included here are: Steve Carr, Deborah L. Davitt, Lucy Ann Fiorini, Sahara Frost, Philip Brian Hall, Amanda Justice, Felicia Lee, Tom Mead, Wendy Nikel, Patsy Pratt-Herzog, Louise Taylor, and E.G. Thompson.

In the midst of a Victorian culture ingrained with strict social etiquette and societal norms, Wilkie Collins composed novels that contained asocial, even anarchic, impulses. A contemporary of Dickens, Collins creates a world more Kafkaesque than Dickensian, a world populated by doppelgangers, secret selves, oddballs, and grotesques. The essays of Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins purposefully work to expand Collins's legacy beyond The Woman in White and The Moonstone; they move well past the simplistic view of Collins's works as "sensation novels," "detective novels," or even "popular fiction," all labels that carry with them pejorative connotations. This collection represents the range of Collins's aesthetic project from various critical perspectives. New methodological and theoretical approaches are applied both to him most popular and to his lesser-known works, giving the reader a broader picture of this multifaceted and undervalued writer The Editors: Maria K. Bachman in an assistant professor of English at Coastal Carolina University. Her articles have appeared in Victorian Newsletter, Literature and Psychology, The Dickensian, and Dickens Studies Annual. Don Richard Cox is a professor of English and associate dean at the University of Tennessee. His books include Sexuality andVictorian Literature (Tennessee), Arthur Conan Doyle, and Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood: An Annotated Bibliography. He is the coeditor, with Maria Bachman, of an edition of Wilkie Collins's final novel, Blind Love

Wilkie Collins was one of the most popular writers of the nineteenth century. He is best known for The Woman in White, which inaugurated the sensation novel in the 1860s, and The Moonstone, one of the first detective novels; but he wrote over 20 novels, plays and short stories during a career that spanned four decades. This Companion offers a fascinating overview of Collins's writing. In a wide range of essays by leading scholars, it traces the development of his career, his position as a writer and his complex relation to contemporary cultural movements and debates. Collins's exploration of the tensions which lay beneath Victorian society is analysed through a variety of critical approaches. A chronology and guide to further reading are provided, making this book an indispensable guide for all those interested in Wilkie Collins and his work.

Biographical studies on Wilkie Collins and Sheridan Le Fanu, British fiction authors.