The Beast with Five Fingers

‘ …the hand was writhing in agonized contortions, squirming and wriggling upon the nail like a worm upon a hook. ‘We’ll keep it there until it dies,’ he said. ‘May I burn in hell, if I ever open the door of that safe again.’The brilliant and scary ‘The Beast with Five Fingers’, is the first entry in this mammoth collection of strange and chilling short stories by W. F. Harvey, an unjustly neglected author of supernatural tales. This unique volume demonstrates clearly that Harvey is one of the masters of the genre. Along with such classics as ‘August Heat’, which concerns two strangers whose individual fates become inextricably entwined in a nightmare scenario and the gruesome school yarn, ‘The Dabblers’, you will find such minor masterpieces of the uncanny as ‘The Man Who Hated Aspidistras’, ‘Sarah Bennet’s Possession’, ‘The Habeas Corpus Club’ and many more stories which refreshingly avoid the cliché while at the same time creating that wonderfully eerie sense of fear.