The Little Blue Flames and Other Uncanny Tales(2022)

Edgar Allan Poe

This title presents 13 mini masterpieces from one of the most undeservedly neglected authors of twentieth century strange fiction. Nick Freeman, specialist in Gothic literature at Loughborough University, has selected the contents based on the author’s best work.

In the midst of this sudden and wild galloping brain-storm I remembered what Ferrers had said about the candlesticks. There was something sinister and uncanny about them. And I knew with a certainty that if I lay and watched I should see something unbearable.

The supernatural tales of A. M. Burrage were recognized by contemporaries such as M. R. James and the critic E. F. Bleiler as some of the most imaginative and cleverly told ghost stories in the English language, and yet today his name haunts the fringes of the genre. Burrage was unafraid to position his ghosts among the trappings of modernity, and his experiments with the genre set him apart from the antiquarian ‘Jamesian’ tradition.

Presenting 13 of the author’s best tales from the 1920s and 30s – including accounts of uncanny living wax figures, unsettling timeslips into troubled pasts and Burrage’s horror masterpiece ‘One Who Saw’ – this collection is another step towards restoring A. M. Burrage’s name to the heights of the best writers of supernatural fiction.