The Undying Thing and Others

Over the course of a long career, chiefly as a humorist, British writer Barry Pain (1864-1928) wrote a substantial body of horror fiction. His early volume, Stories in the Dark (1901), contains a number of powerful specimens, including “The Undying Thing,” a tale of a hideous entity lurking in the woods that was much appreciated by H. P. Lovecraft. Later collections-Here and Hereafter (1911), Stories in Grey (1912), and the untitled collection in the series “Short Stories of To-day and Yesterday” (1928)-each contain their modicum of weird specimens, including such notable items as “Smeath,” involving precognition; “Linda,” a tale of a pact with the Devil; “Not on the Passenger-List,” in which a dead husband torments his living wife on a ship; and “The Reaction,” about a powerful drug. This volume collects, for the first time, the totality of Pain’s weird writing, and also includes the rare novel The Shadow of the Unseen (1907), cowritten with James Blyth, an effective tale of witchcraft. The volume features an introduction by S. T. Joshi, one of the world’s leading authorities on supernatural fiction.