The Little Blue Flames and Other Uncanny Tales by A. M. Burrage

by Burrage, A. M.; Freeman, Nick

• ISBN13: 9780712354127
• ISBN10: 0712354123
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2023-10-24
• Publisher: British Library Publishing
• More Book Details

Summary

This title presents 13 mini masterpieces from one of the most undeservedly neglected authors of twentieth century strange fiction. Nick Freeman, specialist in Gothic literature at Loughborough University, has selected the contents based on the author’s best work.

In the midst of this sudden and wild galloping brain-storm I remembered what Ferrers had said about the candlesticks. There was something sinister and uncanny about them. And I knew with a certainty that if I lay and watched I should see something unbearable.

The supernatural tales of A. M. Burrage were recognized by contemporaries such as M. R. James and the critic E. F. Bleiler as some of the most imaginative and cleverly told ghost stories in the English language, and yet today his name haunts the fringes of the genre. Burrage was unafraid to position his ghosts among the trappings of modernity, and his experiments with the genre set him apart from the antiquarian ‘Jamesian’ tradition.

Presenting 13 of the author’s best tales from the 1920s and 30s – including accounts of uncanny living wax figures, unsettling timeslips into troubled pasts and Burrage’s horror masterpiece ‘One Who Saw’ – this collection is another step towards restoring A. M. Burrage’s name to the heights of the best writers of supernatural fiction.

Author Biography

Alfred McLelland Burrage (1889–1956) was an English author who wrote a huge number of stories for the pulp magazines of the early twentieth century, including ghost and horror fiction, historical romance and adventure tales for younger readers. He also wrote a handful of novels, including a visceral first-hand account of his experience on the battlefields of France, War is War, under the pseudonym ‘Ex-Private X’.

Nick Freeman took a BA in English at Leeds University before doing postgraduate work at the University of Bristol. He taught at Bristol, the Open University, and the University of the West of England before coming to Loughborough in 2006. He is an authority on the decadent culture of the 1890s, and the author of two well-received books, Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art 1870-1914 (2007) and 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late-Victorian Britain (2011, paperback 2013).
 

Table of Contents

C O N T E N T S
Introduction vii
A Note from the Publisherxiii

The Waxwork1
Nobody’s House15
Someone in the Room29
For the Local Rag43
The Wrong Station59
The Acquittal69
The Running Tide87
The Little Blue Flames103
Playmates113
One Who Saw141
The Recurring Tragedy159
Browdean Farm173
The Green Scarf189
Smee207
The Sweeper221