The Black Reaper

Description

Published in 2017 by HarperCollins.

Bernard Capes was celebrated as one of the most prolific authors of the late Victorian period, producing dozens of short stories, articles, and more than forty novels across multiple genres, culminating in the first original crime novel published by Collins, The Skeleton Key.

Bernard Capes was celebrated as one of the most prolific authors of the late Victorian period, producing dozens of short stories, articles, and more than forty novels across multiple genres, culminating in the first original crime novel published by Collins, The Skeleton Key. His greatest acclaim, however, came from penning some of the most terrifying ghost stories of the era. Yet following his death in 1918 his work all but slipped into oblivion until the 1980s, when veteran anthologist Hugh Lamb first collected Capes’s tales of terror as The Black Reaper.

Every story bears the stamp of Capes’s fertile and deeply pessimistic imagination, from werewolf priests and haunted typewriters to marble hands that come to life and plague-stricken villagers haunted by a scythe-wielding ghost. Now expanded with eleven further stories, a revised introduction and a new foreword by Capes’s grandson, Ian Burns, this classic collection will thrill horror fans and restore Capes’s reputation as one of the best writers in the horror genre.

Contents

Foreword – Ian Burns
Introduction – Hugh Lamb
The Black Reaper
The Vanishing House
The Thing in the Forest
The Accursed Cordonnier
The Shadow-Dance
William Tyrwhitt’s ‘Copy’
A Queer Cicerone
A Gallows-Bird
The Sword of Corporal Lacoste
The Glass Ball
Poor Lucy Rivers
The Apothecary’s Revenge
The Green Bottle
The Closed Door
The Dark Compartment
The Marble Hands
The Moon Stricken
The Queer Picture
Dark Dignum
The Mask
The Strength of the Rope
The White Hare
An Eddy on the Floor
Acknowledgements
Bibliography

Trivia

This is a third edition of the Bernard Capes anthology entitled The Black Reaper. First published in 1989, with almost half the stories, it was then expanded in the limited print 1998 Ash-Tree Press edition.

Praise

I have many anthologies of horror stories,and think of myself as quite an expert. Yet when I acquired this book I was astonished to find a writer I had never heard of before, who writes as well as Wilkie Collins or Algernon Blackwood. All these stories deserve to be read and appreciated, particularly The Moon Stricken, an amazing tale about a waterfall which makes a kind of telescope, through which the Moon can be seen to be peopled with damned souls.

This man had such imagination; it is a crying shame that his work has been neglected for so long. He started writing in 1898, but these stories stand up really well today, and I for one am delighted to have found them at last.

C. M. Collier
Amazon Reviewer

Bernard Capes is my great, great, great uncle and it is amazing to read his books – I have some of the originals – and really love them. It is great that others do too.

Zoe Carlton
Amazon Reviewer

Other Editions

Hardcover – Published in 1998 by Ash-Tree Press

Paperback – Published in 1989 by Equation

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