Crypt Classics: Best 19th Century Horror Stories Annotated

by Arthur Machen, Andrew Barger (editor), H.G. Wells

Crypt Best 19th Century Horror Stories is annotated by award-winning author and editor, Andrew Barger. The anthology delivers 13 haunting tales that will leave an indelible mark on your mind. Andrew read hundreds of horror short stories from long forgotten magazines to compile the 13 greatest of this crucial 100-year period for horror short stories. At the back of the book he includes a list of all short stories he considered along with their dates of publication and author, when available. He includes background information for each of the stories and author photos. A number of the stories were published in leading periodicals of the day such as Blackwood's and Atkinson's Casket.This fully annotated edition of each story throughoutLiterary comments and analysesCitations from 19th century magazinesAn introduction by Andrew BargerBackground information for each of the 13 horror short storiesComparisons of other horror stories of the century in questionList of stories considered by Andrew Barger when choosing the very best

326 pages, Paperback

Published March 16, 2024

About the author

Arthur Machen was a leading Welsh author of the 1890s. He is best known for his influential supernatural, fantasy, and horror fiction. His long story The Great God Pan made him famous and controversial in his lifetime, but The Hill of Dreams is generally considered his masterpiece. He also is well known for his leading role in creating the legend of the Angels of Mons.

At the age of eleven, Machen boarded at Hereford Cathedral School, where he received an excellent classical education. Family poverty ruled out attendance at university, and Machen was sent to London, where he sat exams to attend medical school but failed to get in. Machen, however, showed literary promise, publishing in 1881 a long poem "Eleusinia" on the subject of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Returning to London, he lived in relative poverty, attempting to work as a journalist, as a publisher's clerk, and as a children's tutor while writing in the evening and going on long rambling walks across London.

In 1884 he published his second work, the pastiche The Anatomy of Tobacco, and secured work with the publisher and bookseller George Redway as a cataloguer and magazine editor. This led to further work as a translator from French, translating the Heptameron of Marguerite de Navarre, Le Moyen de Parvenir (Fantastic Tales) of Béroalde de Verville, and the Memoirs of Casanova. Machen's translations in a spirited English style became standard ones for many years.

Around 1890 Machen began to publish in literary magazines, writing stories influenced by the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, some of which used gothic or fantastic themes. This led to his first major success, The Great God Pan. It was published in 1894 by John Lane in the noted Keynotes Series, which was part of the growing aesthetic movement of the time. Machen's story was widely denounced for its sexual and horrific content and subsequently sold well, going into a second edition.

Machen next produced The Three Impostors, a novel composed of a number of interwoven tales, in 1895. The novel and the stories within it were eventually to be regarded as among Machen's best works. However, following the scandal surrounding Oscar Wilde later that year, Machen's association with works of decadent horror made it difficult for him to find a publisher for new works. Thus, though he would write some of his greatest works over the next few years, some were published much later. These included The Hill of Dreams, Hieroglyphics, A Fragment of Life, the story The White People, and the stories which make up Ornaments in Jade.