The Black Reaper

Bernard Capes (1854–1918) was one of the most original and imaginative writers of his day, and yet within a decade of his death his work was virtually forgotten—in spite of critical praise from G.K. Chesterton, who approvingly pointed to Capes's ability to write a penny-dreadful "so as to make it worth a pound".Capes's tales of terror show him at his best, and the stories revived by Hugh Lamb in this new selection will delight all connoisseurs of fantasy and the macabre. Here Capes conjures up a vision of the moon as a repository of lost souls; the soul of a dead glassblower trapped in a bottle; a werewolf priest in a grisly variation of Little Red Riding Hood; a prison cell haunted by a dead man who makes the dust swirl constantly; a wicked ancestor who steps down from his portrait...Every story in this collection bears the stamp of Capes's fertile and deeply pessimistic imagination—from Napoleonic terrors and haunted typewriters to marble hands that come to life and plague-stricken villagers haunted by a scythe-wielding ghost—and taken together confirm Capes's standing as a first-rate master of the macabre.