Christopher Priest

Gerald Kersh

Michael McDowell

Michael Blumlein

Florence Marryat

Hugh Walpole

Richard Marsh

Stephen Gregory

Bernard Taylor

John Blackburn

Francis King

Mary Cholmondeley

Charles Birkin

John Trevena

M. G. Lewis

Forrest Reid

Hugh Fleetwood

In this volume, you will encounter tales of ghosts, haunted houses, witchcraft, vampirism, lycanthropy, and sea monsters. Stories of cruelty and vengeance, of a body that refuses to be cremated, a deranged performer with one last shocking show, a frozen corpse that may not be dead. With stories ranging from frightening to horrific to weird to darkly funny, by a lineup of authors that includes both masters of horror fiction and award-winning literary greats, this is a horror anthology like no other. Spanning two hundred years of horror, this new collection features seventeen macabre gems, including two original tales and many others that have never or seldom been reprinted, by: Charles Birkin • John Blackburn • Michael Blumlein • Mary Cholmondeley • Hugh Fleetwood • Stephen Gregory • Gerald Kersh • Francis King • M. G. Lewis • Florence Marryat • Richard Marsh • Michael McDowell • Christopher Priest • Forrest Reid • Bernard Taylor • Hugh Walpole 'The things were there and they were hiding in the slime; waiting ... waiting to clutch and claw and savage’ - AUNTY GREEN by John Blackburn ‘The sound that came from her throat, a small, pleading cry of terror, was cut off before she’d hardly had a chance to utter it’ - OUT OF SORTS by Bernard Taylor ‘The words filled her with an indescribable fear, and she turned to run; but her way was blocked by a figure, gigantic in stature​ – and its monstrous shape moved towards her, and she knew it was the incarnation of evil itself ’ - THE TERROR ON TOBIT by Charles Birkin

The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories: Volume One

Harry Fabian is a ponce, a Flash Harry in an expensive suit, a cockney wide boy who adopts American tones and talks big, yet will never make it to the top. He operates in the Soho of the 1930s, a metropolitan tangle of dodgy geezers, prostitutes, spivs and strong-arm men. Twice filmed, Night and the City is a seminal low-life novel, which presents a vivid glimpse of a lost London. It also marks the return of a lost London author, Gerald Kersh, a maveruck character whose life was as colourful as those of his most flamboyant creations.

Night and the City

An amazing comic novel by Kersh (Night and The City). It's the tale of a young man who enters the peculiar underworld of Cockney Theatre, and quickly finds himself wrapped up in scams, treachery, nitro-glycerine and midgets. This bawdy, rollicking novel, featuring in Sam Yudenow the most fittingly peculiar dialogue since Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop graced the stage, is the last to be written by Kersh. Published in 1957, only a year after The Ginger Man's runaway success in London, the work may have suffered by its release from a mainstream UK publisher. (Where were the censors?)

Fowlers End

An expedition in South America uncovers a terrifying race of men without bones who literally suck the life out of their prey. A man in 20th-century London makes a horrifying discovery about a monster found off the coast of Brighton in 1745. A sea captain goes ashore on a deserted island and finds what seem to be the bones of a previously unknown species of monster, only to learn that the bones tell a much more tragic tale than he could ever have imagined. A war correspondent meets a soldier who claims to be 438 years old. These are the plots of just a few of the weird tales you will find in this book. Gerald Kersh (1911-1968) was a brilliant and inventive writer acclaimed in his time for his gritty novels of London life and his often bizarre short fiction, but he has unfortunately become neglected since his death. This volume includes an introduction by award-winning science fiction author Harlan Ellison, who also selected the eleven stories that appear in this collection and which represent the very best of Kersh's short fiction. "No mortal can write this well." - Harlan Ellison "Sometimes funny, sometimes nightmarish, always first-class entetainment." - The New York Times "Kersh had a wild imagination matched by a vivid, near-hallucinatory style ... the cumulative impact of his short stories is horrific in the extreme." - Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural

Nightshade and Damnations (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

With The Song Of The Flea (1948) Gerald Kersh revisited the demi-monde of his famous Night And The City; but this novel concerns a writer, striving doggedly to make his living. 'A remarkable novel... with this book Mr Kersh has taken a big step forward.' Sunday Times '[Kersh] has a remarkable talent... he is one of the comparatively few living novelists in this country who write with energy and originality and whose ideas are not drawn from a residuum of novels that have been written before... [ The Song of the Flea] is the story of John Pym, a young man trying to earn his living as a writer... Mr Kersh draws on his picturesque and convincing knowledge of human vileness in a manner which is both entertaining and instructive.' Times Literary Supplement.

The Song of the Flea

Harlan Ellison In the worst, poorest, most benighted corner of London is Fowlers End, one of the most godforsaken spots on the face of the earth. It is here that young Daniel Laverock, starving and nearly penniless at the height of the Great Depression, takes the only job he can find: manager of the Pantheon Theater, a rundown old silent cinema owned by Sam Yudenow. Yudenow, an incorrigible swindler and one of the great comic grotesques in English literature, at first seems merely an amusing old fool, but Laverock soon discovers he is actually a despicable rogue. And when one of Yudenow's schemes finally goes too far, Laverock and his co-worker Copper Baldwin decide to teach him a lesson with a grand scheme of their own, with hilarious and unpredictable results.

Fowler's End

A Long, Cool Day in Hell

Nightshades and Damnations

This collection of 37 stories by a master of the form features tales that are sometimes funny, sometimes violent, and sometimes weird and nightmarish: in short, it is quintessential Gerald Kersh. Kersh (1911-1968) published more than thirty books, including the noir classic "Night and the City" (1938) and "Fowlers End" (1957), which Anthony Burgess called "one of the great comic novels of the century," as well as hundreds of short stories which were once ubiquitous in British and American magazines. But though he has been championed by Angela Carter, Harlan Ellison, Ian Fleming, Michael Moorcock and others, Kersh has undeservedly fallen into neglect since his death. This is the first-ever reprint of "Neither Man Nor Dog" (1946), one of the author's scarcest volumes. Kersh's novels "Fowlers End" and "The Great Wash" and the short story collections "Nightshade and Damnations," "On an Odd Note," and "Clock Without Hands" are also available from Valancourt. "[B]rutal but highly talented ... at least one [story] is ... a little masterpiece, and all of them possess the virtue of being highly readable." - J.D. Beresford, "The Guardian" "[E]xplosive with violence . . . The best of them are very good. The unfailing fertility of his imagination is indeed to be wondered at . . . For entertainment of a strong kind, Mr. Kersh would be hard to beat." - "Times Literary Supplement" "Kersh tells a story, as such, rather better than anybody else." - Pamela Hansford Johnson, "Daily Telegraph"

Neither Man Nor Dog (Valancourt 20th Century Classics)

Venture into this alarmingly convincing world, meet the horse whose stubbornness changed history, or the man damned to everlasting love, or the murderer who confessed... and confessed... and confessed. Learn, too the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile, or what really happened to Ambrose Bierce. And ponder, if you can, the case of Simple Simon, who lost the only important thing he had--and never even missed it. Lean back, relax, take a long look at the world of Kersh. You may never recover.

Men Without Bones

The Secret Masters

Follows the fortunes of a poetic Hungarian cafe owner in pre-World War 2 London, a man who is a humanist, a lover of women, and the innocent victim of a calculating world.

The Angel and the Cuckoo

'It is a quality of flamboyant vigour in Mr Kersh that wins attention first of all for his fiction, and more especially, perhaps, for his occasional short story. When his flamboyant energy of sentiment and language comes off he achieves an effect of genuine distinction; at his surest, that is, he is a short story writer of a strongly individual and rewarding kind... the best and cleverest [of the 23 stories in this volume] tells with excellent economy of a ventriloquist's dummy which was inhabited, or so it seemed, by the spirit of the ventriloquist's murdered father... 'The Drunk And The Blind', the sketch of an old, battered and mentally ruined boxer, is done with a telling and slightly brutal power. 'The Devil That Troubled The Chess-Board'... is another sound thing in a vein of the slightly macabre.' Times Literary Supplement (1944)

The Horrible Dummy and Other Stories

The World, the Flesh, & the Devil

A Fantastic Novel

An Ape, a Dog, and a Serpent

Prelude to a Certain Midnight

They Die with Their Boots Clean

'[Gerald Kersh] is a story-teller of an almost vanished kind - though the proper description is perhaps a teller of 'rattling good yarns'... He is fascinated by the grotesque and the bizarre, by the misfits of life, the angry, the down-and-outs and the damned. A girl of eight commits a murder. Some circus freaks are shipwrecked on an island. A chess champion walks in his sleep and destroys the games he has so carefully planned...' TLS 'Beneath his talented lightness and fantasy, Gerald Kersh is a serious man... [He] has the ability... to create a world which is not realistic and which is yet entirely credible and convincing on its own fantastic terms.' New York Times 'Mr Kersh tells a story; as such, rather better than anybody else.' Pamela Hansford Johnson, Telegraph

The Best of Gerald Kersh

Clock Without Hands

'The Thousand Deaths Of Mr Small is the best novel that Gerald Kersh has yet written... Charles Small, successful advertising expert and miserable man, turns over in his mind the 'stinking, sour, stagnant, untransmitted mass' which is his life... This book has a rich, warm quality; long and full of detail, it teems with humour, satire, incident, character; in a word, with life.' Yorkshire Post 'It see-saws from side-splitting dialogue to such catalogues of loathing and revulsion as have rarely been seen in print, from outrageous farce to sudden compassion for the Smalls of this world, who find Hell enough in 'the eternal contemplation of themselves as they made themselves.'' New York Herald Tribune 'With brilliant descriptive power and an emetic vocabulary, [Kersh] has produced a tormented and forceful work.' Commonweal

Gerald Kersh

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