Search Worlds Without End

Readers are well aware that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein: few know how many other tales of terror she created. In addition to Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote some surprisingly effective horror stories. The year after Little Women appeared, Louisa May Alcott published one of the first mummy tales. These ladies weren't alone. From the earliest days of Gothic and horror fiction, women were exploring the frontiers of fear, dreaming dark dreams that will still keep you up at night.

More Deadly than the Male includes unexpected horror tales by Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and forgotten writers like Mary Cholmondely and Charlotte Riddell, whose work deserves a modern audience. Readers will be drawn in by the familiar names and intrigued by their rare stories.

In The Beckside Boggle, Alice Rea brings a common piece of English folklore to hair-raising life, while Helene Blavatsky, best known as the founder of the spiritualist Theosophical Society, conjures up a solid and satisfying ghost story in The Cave of the Echoes. Edith Wharton's great novel The Age of Innocence won her the Pulitzer prize, yet her horror stories are known only to a comparative few.

Table of Contents:

• The Transformation - short story by Mary Shelley
• The Dark Lady - (1850) - short fiction by Mrs. S. C. Hall
• Morton Hall - (1853) - short fiction by Mrs. Gaskell [as by Elizabeth Gaskell]
• A Ghost Story - (1858) - short story by Ada Trevanion
• An Engineer's Story - (1866) - novelette by Amelia B. Edwards
• Lost in a Pyramid, or the Mummy's Curse - (1869) - short story by Louisa May Alcott
• Tom Toothacre's Ghost Story - (1871) - short story by Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Kentucky's Ghost - (1868) - short story by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
• At Chrighton Abbey - (1871) - novelette by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
• The Fate of Madame Cabanel - (1880) - short story by Eliza Lynn Linton
• Forewarned, Forearmed - (1874) - short story by Mrs. J. H. Riddell
• The Portrait - (1885) - novelette by Margaret Oliphant
• The Shrine Of Death - (1886) - short story by Lady Dilke
• The Beckside Boggle - (1886) - short story by Alice Rea
• The Hidden Door - (1886) - novelette by Vernon Lee
• Unexplained - (1888) - short fiction by Mary Louisa Molesworth
• Let Loose - (1890) - short story by Mary Cholmondeley
• The Cave of the Echoes - short story by Helena P. Blavatsky
• The Yellow Wall Paper - (1937) - short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (variant of The Yellow Wall-Paper 1892)
• The Mass for the Dead - short story by E. Nesbit
• The Tyburn Ghost - (1896) - short story by The Countess of Munster
• The Duchess at Prayer - (1900) - novelette by Edith Wharton
• The Vacant Lot - (1902) - short story by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
• An Unscientific Story - (1903) - short story by Louise J. Strong
• A Dissatisfied Soul - (1904) - short fiction by Annie Trumbull Slosson
• The Readjustment - (1908) - short fiction by Mary Austin