Eyes of Terror and Other Dark Adventures

by L.T. Meade, Janis Dawson (Editor)

Despite her wide contributions to genre literature, Irish author L. T. Meade is now remembered, if at all, for her girls' school stories. However, in 1898 the Strand Magazine, famous for its fictions of crime, detection, and the uncanny, proclaimed Meade one of its most popular writers for her contributions to its signature fare. Her stories, widely published in popular fin de siècle magazines, included classic tales of the supernatural, but her specialty was medical or scientific mysteries featuring doctors, scientists, occult detectives, criminal women with weird powers, unusual medical interventions, fantastic scientific devices, murder, mesmerism, and manifestations of insanity. Eyes of Terror and Other Dark Adventures is the first collection to showcase the best of her pioneering strange fiction.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Horror, Mystery

266 pages, Paperback

First published September 22, 2021

About the author

Mrs. L.T. Meade (Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Toulmin Smith), was a prolific children's author of Anglo Irish extraction. Born in 1844, Meade was the eldest daughter of a Protestant clergyman, whose church was in County Cork. Moving from Ireland to London as a young woman, after the death of her mother, she studied in the Reading Room of the British Museum in preparation for her intended career as a writer, before marrying Alfred Toulmin Smith in September 1879.

The author of close to 300 books, Meade wrote in many genres, but is best known for her girls' school stories. She was one of the editors of the girls' magazine, Atalanta from 1887-93, and was active in women's issues. She died in 1914.

Reviews

[ClareT · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've developed a bit of a liking for weird stories of the turn of the last century - prompted by Women's Weird. Unfortunately I haven't found any collections to match that one yet and this is another that is not quite there.
The stories are all by L.T. Meade, an Irish writer who wrote lots of mysteries and supernatural stories, often with a partner, at the end of the twentieth century. The nine stories chosen for this book span the whole range of her fiction.
Some of the stories are quite interesting, the pick of them being, in my opinion, The Woman in the Hood and The Man Who Disappeared, although I must note that some of the stories really do not travel well in terms of political correctness. However, there are quite a few of the stories that are neither horror or mystery and are really quite obvious without building up any particular atmosphere or tension.
I think that it is only really because of the range of topics, from palmistry to hypnosis and the fact that some of the most evil criminals in the stories are women that made me give it three starts. Fun, but not really very dark stories.