The Pleasures of Reading Uneasy Tales – The British Library’s ‘Tales of the Weird’ series

I don’t read much modern fiction these days. The last few contemporary novels I’ve read have included Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver and Per Petterson’s Men in My Situation. You’ll notice those are by Japanese, Finnish-Swedish and Norwegian authors. The truth is that most British modern fiction doesn’t appeal to me. I’m also a fan of the short story form, finding that novels often fail to hold their initial attraction after a while. Many novels either lose momentum for me – or I lose the plot. I often get the impression the author is spinning things out, simply because a modern novel has to be 80,000-100,000 words.

I’m pleased to say, though, that The British Library has come to my rescue. Since 2018, they have been curating and publishing classic strange fiction in their Tales of the Weird series. There are now more than seventy of these handsomely-produced paperbacks and you can take out a subscription to receive a new one each month. So far, I’ve received – and enjoyed reading – a wonderful selection of novels and short story collections.

Weird fiction is hard to define. It’s usually set in a recognisably realistic world but one where supernatural things happen. It can be seen as a subgenre of speculative fiction that began to appear in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s a kind of fiction that has elements of other genres (science fiction, horror and fantasy) but doesn’t necessarily conform to the usual tropes of those genres. This might explain why – although I don’t read sci-fi, fantasy or horror – I really enjoy weird fiction!

Edgar Allan Poe might be considered a founding father of the genre, and H.P. Lovecraft is often cited as a key figure (both have stories featured in the Tales of the Weird collection Spores of Doom – Dank Tales of the Fungal Weird.) But far from drawing on purely American writers, many of the books in the series feature stories from the heyday of British weird fiction, often by writers who might now be considered old-fashioned and quintessentially English. For example, stories by E.F. Benson, Walter de la Mare, Daphne du Maurier and Edith Nesbit are included in the short story collections Phantoms of Kernow – Classic Tales of Haunted Cornwall and The Wayfarer’s Weird – Wild Tales of Uncanny Rambles. I enjoyed these immensely but my favourite book in the series so far has been a novel – The Lost Stradivarius by J. Meade Falkner. First published in 1895, this is a compelling tale involving a bewitching piece of a music and a violin with a sinister history. It sounds like a bizarre premise for a plot but, unlike so many modern novels, it carried me with it right through to the end and I was struck by the originality of the idea and the confidence of the author’s voice. Falkner is best known today for Moonfleet (a tale of smugglers that’s become a children’s classic) but were it not for Tales of the Weird I’m sure I would never have discovered The Lost Stradivarius.

Of course, not every book in the series is to my taste. I admit I struggled with the stylistic quirkiness of Violet Hunt’s The Tiger Skin and Other Tales of the Uneasy. That said, ‘Tales of the Uneasy’ is another helpful way of thinking about weird fiction. Unease is a pervading mood in weird fiction (and is often all the more effective for it.)

I didn’t get on too well with Bird of Ill Omen – The Gothic Tales of Catherine Crowe, though the introduction tells an interesting and sad story about how Crowe seems to have suffered a psychotic episode in which she was found naked in the streets of Edinburgh, believing that spirits had rendered her invisible. It being 1854, this damaged her considerable literary reputation and, shamefully, even her contemporary Charles Dickens weighed in to make fun of her ‘madness.’

I did manage to finish E.H.Visiak’s novel Medusa, but it left me a bit baffled. It’s said to combine Conradian sea adventure with Atlantean mythology ...but I got a bit lost! Still, who can resist the book’s subtitle – ‘a novel of mystery, ecstasy and strange horror’? Surely we need more novels of mystery, ecstasy and strange horror and, thankfully, it looks like there is no shortage of them in the archives of the British Library.

The full range of The British Library's Tales of the Weird series can be found here.