Irish-born playwright and novelist Samuel Beckett, one of the most individual voices of post-war literature, famously said: 'Personally, I have no bone to pick with graveyards, I take the air there willingly, perhaps more willingly than elsewhere, when take the air I must.'

In a similarly phlegmatic spirit, Wordsworth Editions presents this spellbinding collection of chilling Gothic tales of the macabre, all drawn from the rich and varied literary tradition of a culture long in thrall to things supernatural. The Irish, as William Butler Yeats remarked, 'any day prefer a ghost story or a fairy tale to The Times newspaper'.

Featuring the imaginative writings of such towering masters of the genre as Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Patrick Kennedy, Thomas Crofton-Croker and George Moore, this volume of ghoulish masterpieces from the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries is an encapsulation of the arcane lore, magic realism and fantastic creativity of the Irish.