Edited by Jason Colavito
JasonColavito.com Books, 2011
JasonColavito.com Books, 2011
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Unseen Horror is the first release from my new line of JasonColavito.com exclusive books on subjects of special interest to my readers.
The tension between the seen and the unseen is a driving force behind horror. More often than not, it is what we cannot see that is most frightening, or, as the iconic horror writer H. P. Lovecraft put it in his study of the genre, Supernatural Horror in Literature, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown.” The most famous Victorian story of the invisible is H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897), but Wells’s story is hardly the only example of unseen terrors to see print in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The fifteen stories in this volume represent more than five decades (1859-1913) of Victorian storytelling about the invisible, ranging from classic stories by major authors, such as Fitz-James O’Brien’s “What Was It?” and Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing,” to obscure gems that have remained out of print since the nineteenth century. A few stories, like the anonymous “The Midnight Fiend” and A. Herbage Edwards’s “Asamayama” even claimed to be true. Taken together, these tales of unseen horror represent an era when the triumph of science seemed to have illuminated every shadow, leaving the invisible the only realm left for monsters to hide—and to attack! |
