Canal, and Leonora

Two tales of undead longing from a writer Lovecraft called one of Weird Tales' most striking contributors. The Canal follows a man drawn to a mysterious figure by the water's edge, where love becomes indistinguishable from dread. Leonora introduces a woman of unsettling beauty who arrives from somewhere beyond the living, her presence both irresistible and terrifying. Worrell writes with the kind of slow, suffocating atmosphere that creeps into your thoughts long after the final page. These are not stories of monsters jumping out at you, but of something far worse: desire for something that should remain dead. Published in 1927, these tales represent the rare female voice in early weird fiction, and The Canal so impressed Lovecraft that he ranked it among his absolute favorites from the magazine. For readers who prefer their horror elegant, unsettling, and dripping with early twentieth-century gothic atmosphere.