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.
