Fantastics and Other Fancies

These are the dreams of a man who refused to wake up. Gathered here are thirty-six of Lafcadio Hearn's earliest forays into the uncanny, written when he was still a journalist in New Orleans and Cincinnati, before he sailed to Japan and became Koizumi Yakumo. The stories pulse with phantasmagoric imagery: ghostly lovers, spectral vengeance, rituals in fog-shrouded swamps, visions from the edge of sleep. Hearn's prose is dense, luscious, and unsettling, the prose of a man who believed the boundary between the living and the dead was merely a veil. H.P. Lovecraft, no stranger to terror himself, called this collection containing some of the most impressive ghoulishness in all literature. He wasn't wrong. These aren't mere ghost stories. They are fever dreams rendered in Victorian Gothic, saturated with romance and dread in equal measure. Some are barely a page long; all of them linger like the memory of a nightmare you can't quite shake.