Sea Mist

Collected Spook Stories, Volume Five

Edited by Jack Adrian
Jacket artwork by Douglas Walters

Although E. F. Benson's four volumes of short weird tales are acknowledged classics of their kind, original hardback editions are now difficult to obtain, and when copies are offered for sale their price is often prohibitive. Too, recent research has, to an extent, rendered them out of date, since over the past two decades nearly a score of previously uncollected stories have been unearthed, which need to be integrated within the 'spook story' canon.

The Ash-Tree Press 'Collected Spook Stories', under the editorship of Jack Adrian, now brings together all of E. F. Benson's known tales of the strange and the supernatural into an extended five-volume set. This collected edition presents all of the recently discovered weird tales from The Flint Knife (1988), and those from the 'Spook Stories' sections of Desirable Residences (1991) and Fine Feathers (1994). It also features a radical rearranging of the stories themselves into their chronological order of composition and publication.

Sea Mist—the fifth an final volume in the series—covers the period between 1927 and 1940. In addition to bringing together a further seventeen stories, the volume contains three marginal weird tales, a fascinating collection of articles in which Benson discusses such topics as J. S. Le Fanu, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, demoniacal possession, and the technique of the ghost story, and editor Jack Adrian's final thoughts about one of the foremost writers of supernatural tales of the last century.

CONTENTS:

• Introduction by Jack Adrian
• Sir Roger de Coverley
• The Box at the Bank
• Pirates
• The Witch-Ball
• The Hanging of Alfred Wadham
• Atmospherics
• The Wishing-Well
• Christopher Comes Back
• The Bed by the Window
• The Shuttered Room
• The Flint Knife
• James Lamp
• The Step
• The Sanctuary
• Monkeys
• Sea Mist
• Dives and Lazarus

Appendix I: Undiscovered Fred

Appendix II: The Illegitimate, the Barely Legitimate, and the Impenetrable

• Introduction
• Mrs Andrews's Control
• The Clandon Crystal
• The Everlasting Silence

Appendix III: The Technique of the Ghost Story' and Others

• Introduction
• The Recent 'Witch-Burning at Clonmel'
• The Fallacy at the Heart of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
• May 29th, 1928
• The Technique of the Ghost Story
• 'Our Sister, the Death of the Body'
• An Unusual Autobiography
• The Brontës
• Sheridan Le Fanu
• Demoniacal Possession
• The Murder of Alan Grebell
• Magic White and Black
• Once a Year
• Social Customs in 1837
• The Ghost in the Secret Garden
• Victorian Biography—and Afterwards
• Sources
• Acknowledgements

Limited to 600 copies