The Living Stone
Handheld Press presents a fearful anthology of forgotten stories to persuade you that a stone hand has been placed on your shoulder when you least expect it, or that something heavy is scraping its way up the stairs. Well-known authors of the uncanny such as Eleanor Scott, Edith Wharton, H P Lovecraft and Arthur Machen are showcased with long-forgotten masters and mistresses of supernatural short stories to frighten the heart into some loud thumpings.
Authors include:
Sabine Baring-Gould, Nellie K Blissett, Bernard Capes, James Causey, Robert W Chambers, N Dennett, August Derleth, W W Fenn, H P Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, W C Morrow, Oliver Onions, E R Punshon, Eleanor Scott, Clark Ashton Smith, and Edith Wharton.
Henry Bartholomew, editor of our Algernon Blackwood anthology, The Unknown (March 2023), has curated this selection and written the Introduction. The Living Stone will be the ninth of the Handheld Weirds: landmark anthologies to redefine the birth of Weird fiction.
Henry Bartholomew
Henry Bartholomew is a lecturer in the English Department at XJTLU. He received his PhD from the University of Exeter, and has taught at both Exeter and the University of Plymouth. His research centers on Gothic and weird fiction, the ghost story, dark ecology, Speculative Realism, and the author Algernon Blackwood. He is the editor of three short story collections, one for the British Library (2020) and two for Handheld Press (2023; 2024). His other published work includes an essay on the uncanny for the journal Open Philosophy (2019) and a chapter on psychic vampires for The Palgrave Handbook to the Vampire (2023). He is currently working on two projects: a substantial, two-volume essay collection for Palgrave titled New Directions to the Ghost Story (due 2025), and a monograph - Gothic Immaterialism: Objects, Affects, and the Ghost Story, 1890-1920 - which examines how new theories about "objects" and "things" shine fresh light on the British ghost story tradition.
Handheld Weirds
Handheld Weirds consists of ten books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.
