More Deadly than the Male: Masterpieces from the Queens of Hor...

A darkly luminous new anthology collecting the most terrifying horror stories by renowned female authors, presenting anew these forgotten classics to the modern reader.Readers are well aware that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein: few know how many other tales of terror she created. In addition to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote some surprisingly effective horror stories. The year after Little Women appeared, Louisa May Alcott published one of the first mummy tales. These ladies weren’t alone. From the earliest days of Gothic and horror fiction, women were exploring the frontiers of fear, dreaming dark dreams that will still keep you up at night. More Deadly than the Male includes unexpected horror tales by Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and forgotten writers like Mary Cholmondely and Charlotte Riddell, whose work deserves a modern audience. Readers will be drawn in by the familiar names and intrigued by their rare stories. In The Beckside Boggle, Alice Rea brings a common piece of English folklore to hair-raising life, while Helene Blavatsky, best known as the founder of the spiritualist Theosophical Society, conjures up a solid and satisfying ghost story in The Cave of the Echoes. Edith Wharton’s great novel The Age of Innocence won her the Pulitzer prize, yet her horror stories are known only to a comparative few.Readers will discover lost and forgotten women who wrote horror every bit as effectively as their male contemporaries. They will learn about their lives and careers, the challenges they faced as women working in a male-dominated field, the way they overcame those challenges, and the way they approached the genre―which was often subtler, more psychological, and more disturbing.

From School Library Journal

Few consider authors Louisa May Alcott, Edith Nesbit, and Edith Wharton purveyors of the macabre. But this collection of horror tales by women writers includes these voices alongside many others, presenting a different perspective of the genre. The entries were written between the years 1830 and 1908. Alcott, Nesbit, and Wharton offer stories about a mummy's curse, an ominous funeral mass that foretells a tragedy, and a ghastly praying statue that hides a secret. Very few of the selections are overtly frightening—these are subtle tales that necessitate careful reading in order to be truly appreciated. Among the standouts are Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Tom Toothacre's Ghost Story," in which the teller describes how a fresh coat of paint can eliminate a troublesome spirit; Vernon Lee's "The Hidden Door," in which the main character may be haunted by an evil spirit or by his own guilty conscience; and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wall Paper," an account of madness that contains no supernatural elements yet is among the more horrifying pieces here. VERDICT For those who enjoy in-your-face, blood-and-guts horror, this work won't satisfy. But it will delight those who desire shivery tales of moral ambiguity, subtlety, and psychological dilemma.—Heather M. Campbell, formerly at Philip S. Miller Library, Castle Rock, CO

About the Author

Graeme Davis has been fascinated by horror fiction since his teens, devouring late-night reruns of the classic Universal and Hammer movies on his parents’ black-and-white TV and stripping local thrift-stores of horror titles. He began writing for tabletop role-playing games in the early 1980s, and among many other credits he helped develop Games Workshop’s blockbuster Warhammer dark-fantasy franchise and the 90s Gothic hit Vampire: The Masquerade, as well as more than 40 electronic games. This is his second anthology for Pegasus, following on from the 2017 collection Colonial Horrors. He lives in Lafayette, Colorado.

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