Introduction by Brian J. Showers. Cover image by R.B. Russell.
"A Midsummer Ramble in the Carpathians" was long-listed for Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year 2012!
"...man is made a mystery for mysteries and visions..." — Arthur Machen
A mentally disturbed woman is entrapped in Beltane rituals in the Cumbrian fells; a widower mourning his wife falls beneath the mystic allure of Iona; a quest to the Italian Apennines brings a lonely man to a dread Marian revelation; an alcoholic on a Scottish isle is haunted by a deceased chronicler of local legend; in a small German town a sinister doll discloses truths about a murky family tragedy; an unknown journal by a Victorian travel-writer sends a woman on a grim odyssey to Transylvania; in a childhood holiday paradise a man encounters a demented artist's terrifying legacy. The protagonists in Peter Bell's stories confront the awesome, the numinous, the uncanny, the lure of genius loci, and landscapes undergoing strange epiphanies.
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