Black Dog and Other Stories

A. E. Coppard's 1923 collection introduces readers to eighteen tales that occupy a peculiar corner of English literature, where moonlight falls on country lanes and ancient forces stir beneath the surface of ordinary life. Coppard writes with a lyricism that feels almost archaic, his sentences bending like willows in a wind that carries whispers from another age. In stories like 'The Black Dog,' a spectral hound stalks the living with eyes like burning coals, while 'The Devil in the Churchyard' pits a stubborn squire against a force he cannot outwit or outrun. These are not mere ghost stories. They are explorations of what lingers in the margins of the modern world: old pacts, forgotten superstitions, the weight of tradition pressing against the thin membrane of rationality. Coppard's characters farm, marry, drink, and die in the Cotswolds and Sussex of a hundred years ago, but they move through a landscape shot through with dread and wonder. His influence on the English short story would echo through decades, yet this collection remains strangely underread. For readers who crave fiction that unsettles rather than simply entertains, these stories offer a portal to something irreducible and strange.