Twin Spirits

This volume contains the ghostly tales of the British writer W. W. Jacobs (1863–1943), best known for the immortal classic “The Monkey’s Paw.” But Jacobs wrote many other weird tales throughout the course of his life, many of them set on the high seas. Jacobs was best known in his time as a comic writer, and he fuses humor and weirdness with a deft touch. This volume is the first to include Jacobs’s complete weird writing—and also includes two dramatic adaptations of his stories as well as Louis N. Parker’s celebrated dramatization of “The Monkey’s Paw.” The Classics of Gothic Horror series seeks to reprint novels and stories from the leading writers of weird fiction over the past two centuries or more. Ever since the Gothic novels of the late 18th century, supernatural horror has been a slender but provocative contribution to Western literature. Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, the Victorian ghost story writers, the “titans” of the early twentieth century (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft), the Weird Tales writers, and many others contributed to the development and enrichment of weird fiction as a literary genre, and their work deserves to be enshrined in comprehensive, textually accurate editions. S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction, has done exactly that in establishing this series. Using scholarly resources honed over decades of wide-ranging research, he has assembled volumes featuring not only the complete weird writings of the authors in question, but exhaustive bio-critical introductions and bibliographical data. 3