Out of the Past: Tales of Haunting History (Tales of the Weird)

“Come inside, my bonny witch-finder. Here is shelter for thee…”A tale of callous murder and deranged revenge rings out from fifteenth century Italy. A witch-finder’s great triumph is also the herald of his own doom in sixteenth-century Britain. A prisoner’s fate at the hands of the Inquisition in seventeenth-century Mexico leads to an encounter with the bestial and bizarre beneath the waves.Readers and writers have been fascinated with the past long before the term ‘historical fiction’ became recognized as its own genre of writing. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, tellers of strange tales saw the weird potential in setting stories within the realms of previous centuries, and the chance to evoke terrors throughout time.Summoning eleven stories chosen for their uncanny portrayals of weird history, this collection presents a dark timeline of grim visions harking from plague-racked England to revolutionary France and culminating in the last gasps of the nineteenth century.Includi