'[Gerald Kersh] is a story-teller of an almost vanished kind - though the proper description is perhaps a teller of 'rattling good yarns'... He is fascinated by the grotesque and the bizarre, by the misfits of life, the angry, the down-and-outs and the damned. A girl of eight commits a murder. Some circus freaks are shipwrecked on an island. A chess champion walks in his sleep and destroys the games he has so carefully planned...' TLS 'Beneath his talented lightness and fantasy, Gerald Kersh is a serious man... [He] has the ability... to create a world which is not realistic and which is yet entirely credible and convincing on its own fantastic terms.' New York Times 'Mr Kersh tells a story; as such, rather better than anybody else.' Pamela Hansford Johnson, Telegraph

'[This] is the story of the beginning and the end of St Paul, that most complicated and worrying of all the saints. The narrator is Diomed, a colonial officer stationed at Tarsus, enlightened, intelligent, a great fraterniser with the patrician natives, [who] sends the strange young Jew to persecute the Nazarenes... [Kersh brings] a highly concentrated area of Roman colonial history to very real life - the ornate wine-cup, the crapulous cold fruit-juice at dawn, dust on a sandal... King Jesus is here, all the time... the fly-itch nuisance to the Empire that wakes its prefects up in nightmare... This is a masterly book, full of live people and a live age, live language, too... We may adjudge Mr Kersh, after reading The Implaccable Hunter, to be now at the height of his powers.' Anthony Burgess, Yorkshire Post, 1961

Harlan Ellison In the worst, poorest, most benighted corner of London is Fowlers End, one of the most godforsaken spots on the face of the earth. It is here that young Daniel Laverock, starving and nearly penniless at the height of the Great Depression, takes the only job he can find: manager of the Pantheon Theater, a rundown old silent cinema owned by Sam Yudenow. Yudenow, an incorrigible swindler and one of the great comic grotesques in English literature, at first seems merely an amusing old fool, but Laverock soon discovers he is actually a despicable rogue. And when one of Yudenow's schemes finally goes too far, Laverock and his co-worker Copper Baldwin decide to teach him a lesson with a grand scheme of their own, with hilarious and unpredictable results.

Prelude to a Certain Midnight, first published in 1947, is a novel of the rise and fall of a group of patrons of a neighborhood bar on a side street of London’s East End. In the midst of the looming World War II, a 10-year-old Jewish girl is murdered. The police have no clues and little interest in solving the crime, so Asta Thundersley, a wealthy woman, turns crusader and takes up the challenge, sifting through clues and gathering suspects for a dinner party where, unfortunately, nothing helpful is learned. A police detective is also involved but similarly, makes little headway. The book is notable for its varied array of colorful characters and evocative narration. Gerald Kersh (1911-1968) was the author of a number of novels and short stories.

An expedition in South America uncovers a terrifying race of men without bones who literally suck the life out of their prey. A man in 20th-century London makes a horrifying discovery about a monster found off the coast of Brighton in 1745. A sea captain goes ashore on a deserted island and finds what seem to be the bones of a previously unknown species of monster, only to learn that the bones tell a much more tragic tale than he could ever have imagined. A war correspondent meets a soldier who claims to be 438 years old. These are the plots of just a few of the weird tales you will find in this book. Gerald Kersh (1911-1968) was a brilliant and inventive writer acclaimed in his time for his gritty novels of London life and his often bizarre short fiction, but he has unfortunately become neglected since his death. This volume includes an introduction by award-winning science fiction author Harlan Ellison, who also selected the eleven stories that appear in this collection and which represent the very best of Kersh's short fiction. "No mortal can write this well." - Harlan Ellison "Sometimes funny, sometimes nightmarish, always first-class entetainment." - The New York Times "Kersh had a wild imagination matched by a vivid, near-hallucinatory style ... the cumulative impact of his short stories is horrific in the extreme." - Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural