Under-the-covers reading

The Eerie Book is a compendium of supernatural short stories and extracts, edited by the Scottish author Margaret Armour in 1898 and beautifully reproduced with a new introduction by the super­natural fiction writer Kirsty Logan. It is lamp-lit, under-the-covers reading featuring dark stormy nights, mysterious apparitions and events that curdle the blood. Cliché is integral to its half-guilty pleasures.

The book’s effects, though, are quite singular. It has minimal editorial apparatus, omitting even original dates of publication and authors’ biographies. Each story, as Logan notes, “leads – or bleeds – into the next”. Original illustrations by W. B. Macdougall in the style of Aubrey Beardsley’s most uncanny images also strip out geographical and historical contexts. They help to bring the stories into a rich, dream-like series of episodes that takes its rhythm not from plot, but from encounters, atmospheres and psychological states. Some of the authors – Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas De Quincey and Mary Shelley – may seem a little over-familiar, but their durability had not been established in 1898. Armour’s lengthy selection from Frankenstein, for instance, anticipates a reappraisal that began three decades later. Other long-forgotten works and authors included here come as suspenseful, absorbing revelations.

The concept of an “eerie” collection is especially curious. Logan’s introduction does not assist with understanding what makes these stories especially “eerie”, as distinct from “weird” or “horrific”, but nor does it set out to. It contains useful sketches about Armour and Macdougall. It is, though, oddly off point when it frames the volume’s main concerns, stating that these stories are linked them­atically by their interest in homes. Quite the opposite: barren wastelands and far-away wildernesses proliferate. The eerie, after all, operates in the uncertain psychological states caused by the solitude and displacement of these settings. In their mystical worlds, the walls between the living and the dead, material reality and spiritual apparitions, are porous.

While this collection is unusual in some ways, it fits a trend. British Library Publishing’s list has boomed with beautifully produced editions of late-nineteenth-century supernatural fiction, including The Haunted Trail: Classic tales of the rambling weird, edited by Weird Walk, and Doomed Romances: Strange tales of uncanny love, edited by Joanne Ella Parsons (both published in 2024). The Eerie Book hits the same sweet spot where scholarly rediscovery shades into readable, marketable fiction. Put another way, it is very different from the contemporary eerie defined by Mark Fisher and Robert McFarlane: a cosy version of eerie fiction, unnerving enough to elicit a frisson with no risk of nightmares.

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