Polar Horrors

Inspired by ground-breaking expeditions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers of the weird began to construct a literary Arctic and Antarctic in which terrors lay undiscovered in the ice and gateways to bizarre hidden worlds lay waiting. From lurid Arctic narratives of life amongst polar bears to tales of ghostly visitations within the wind-blown wilds of the southern continent, this new collection uncovers a wealth of neglected material from this niche of literature obsessed with the limits of human experience.

Featuring tales rife with aliens, twisted science and madness spanning from 1837–1946, this anthology also includes a gem of twenty-first century Arctic horror to trace the enduring lure of these sublime and uncanny spaces at the ends of the Earth.

    Contents

    Introduction by John Miller
1. The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon by James Hogg
2. The Moonstone Mass (1868) by Harriet Prescott Spofford
3. The Captain of the 'Polestar' (1945) by Arthur Conan Doyle (1883)
4. Skule Skerry (1928) by John Buchan
5. The Third Interne (1938) by Idwal Jones
6. Iqsinaqtutalik Piqtuq: The Haunted Blizzard (2019) by Aviaq Johnston
7. A Secret of the South Pole (1902) by Hamilton Drummond
8. In Amundsen's Tent (1928) novelette by John Martin Leahy
9. Creatures of the Light (1930) by Sophie Wenzel Ellis
10. Bride of the Antarctic (1939) by Amelia Reynolds Long
11. Ghost (1943) by Henry Kuttner
12. The Polar Vortex (1946) by Malcolm M. Ferguson