Rudyard Kipling wrote, “For the female of the species is more deadly than the male,” in his 1911 poem. It was not warriors or kings that need be feared, he suggested, but the women who worked in mischievous ways. Here editor Graeme Davis brings together ghostly horror stories penned by women from the long 19th century.
Alice James has jumped a cross-country train to escape from an unknown pursuer. Fighting off searing pain and feverish hallucinations, her Pullman porter insists she come to The Paragon Hotel to hide while she recuperates. This seems like a reasonable enough arrangement. But this is the 1920s, and Alice is white and The Paragon is only for blacks.
One night, a suspicious wife leaves her home in Florida to trace her husband’s footsteps across Havana, Cuba. The only problem is, Richard is dead.
Divided into historical eras, he introduces each piece with contextual information — leading ideas of the time, societal understandings, and philosophies. Then the writings are left to stand on their own.
In Blood & Ivy, Collins uncovers a hasty murder in Harvard’s medical school, a gaslit story for the resurrectionists in a Robert Louis Stevenson book.