Our Haunted Shores: Tales from the Coasts of the British Isles

The sea that night sang rather than chanted; all along the far-running shore a rising tide dropped thick foam, and the waves, white-crested, came steadily in with the swing of a deliberate purpose.From foreboding cliffs and lonely lighthouses to rumbling shingles and silted estuaries, the coasts of the British Isles have stoked the imaginations of storytellers for millennia, lending a rich literary significance to these spaces between land and sea. For those who choose to explore these shores, generations of ghosts, sea-spirits, fairies and tentacled monsters come and go with the tide.This new collection of fifteen short stories, six folk tales and four poems ranging from 1789 to 1933 offers a chilling literary tour of the coasts of Great Britain, Ireland and the Isle of Man, including haunting pieces by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Bram Stoker and Charlotte Riddell.

About the Author

Jimmy Packham focuses on Gothic fiction and on maritime writing, both as separate and overlapping areas of study. He has a long-standing interest in voice and utterance in literary writing, and his work on the Gothic focuses on the haunted and haunting voices that resonate within late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century American Gothic literature.Emily Napier is one of the founders of the Haunted Shores Research Network, an organization exploring horror and Gothic literature based around or inspired by coasts, and aiming to pinpoint the particular appeal and characteristics of the littoral weird. Established in 2020, the research exhibited at the Network’s first symposium in 2021 touched on diverse topics from Victorian smuggling narratives to the enduring appeal of Kaiju cinema.Joan Passey is a teacher and researcher at the University of Bristol specializing in transhistorical Gothic fiction. She is the author of the forthcoming book Cornish Gothic (University of Wales Press) and she has previously published on Ann Radcliffe, Wilkie Collins and Shirley Jackson.

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