British Library Tales of the Weird

John Travers has been hanged for the murder of his mother-in-law Helga, but to those who knew him something is amiss. Driven by justice and a sense of uncanny forces at work, John’s friend Doctor Toogood recounts a haunting tale of love and jealousy under the fell influence of a shadowy and implacable evil.

First published in 1927, this novel by husband-and-wife writing duo Rosalie and Edward Synton (real surname Corse-Scott) has been lost for nearly a century and returns now from the Library collections to deliver its occult thrills anew.

From the imaginations of Gothic short-story writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, and later weirdists such as H.P. Lovecraft came one of the most complex of villains-the mad scientist.

Promethean Horrors presents some of the greatest mad scientists ever created, as each cautionary tale explores the consequences of pushing nature too far.

These savants take many forms: there are malcontents who strive to create poisonous humans; technologists obsessed with genetic splicing; mesmerists interested in the way consciousness operates after death, and inventors who believe in a hidden reality.

From essential Gothic stories by Mary Shelley, E. T. A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe to later forays into the weird and psychedelic by E. Nesbit, H. P. Lovecraft and George Langelaan, the classic figure of the mad scientist is reanimated in these pages along with every untethered ambition and its calamitous consequences.