This volume was published towards the end of the Second World War, and probably marks the ending of paper restrictions. It is a somewhat upmarket volume, with (to my mind, indifferent) illustrations and on quite good paper stock. Original price was twelve shillings and sixpence. The editor is not named; the imprint was actually the work of a Jewish émigré to London, David Gottlieb, whose story is an interesting by-way of 20th century British publishing history (see: http://www.lomaxpress.co.uk/westhouse.html).

The avowed aim of the volume was to explore the mixture of fascination and disgust that Romantic writers held with their own fears and what we would now describe as "the dark side". However, the stories selected seem a little haphazard, and in more than one instance now look more as though they are selected for appearance rather than impact. A number of them don't really have any denouement and are either effective mood pieces or moral tales.

We get three Poes - 'King Pest', which is a collection of grotesques and little else, and two classics, 'The Strange Case of M.Valdemar' and 'The Black Cat'. There is a piece by Herman Melville, 'Bartleby', which is well written but ultimately goes nowhere; there is Dickens' 'The Signalman', which is a well-known piece of early Victorian techno-horror; a le Fanu piece which has no real resolution beyond the death of the protagonist, for which the writer hints at, but fails to effectively deliver, any sort of explanation; an effective piece of local nastiness from Balzac; and the great-grandfather of all those plots where the hope of salvation looks too good to be true and turns out in the end to indeed, be too good to be true is explored in an effective story from Villiers de l'isle Adam.

There are two stories from Robert Louis Stevenson, of which one is an effective piece of what we would now call disablist bullying by a small community, spoilt by being delivered almost entirely in 18th or 19th-century written local Scots dialect, which makes it almost impenetrable and which takes away any of the impact the story might otherwise have; the other, 'A Lodging for the Night', is well-written, effectively shows the nasty side of Parisian medieval life, but which suffers from RLS knowing nothing about 15th-century Paris, imagining it to be pretty much like 19th-century Edinburgh, and also from not really having any particular resolution, much as I kept hoping for something nasty to happen to the protagonist.

The highlights of the collection are two Pushkin stories; 'The Pistol Shot', which is a bit of a fireside tale and doesn't really go anywhere other than to investigate improbable coincidences allowing a duelling story to be finished some eight or so years after it was started; and the highlight for me, 'The Queen of Spades', a tale of supernatural events amongst the decadence of the Tsarist officer class in St. Petersburg, which I knew from the Tchaikovsky opera (sometimes known as 'Pique Dame').

Overall, then, a somewhat uneven collection, not helped by the un-named editor dismissing in the Introduction some of the stories as 'not totally fit for purpose'. But the collection includes sufficient stories of merit to justify anyone seeing a copy of this to acquire it for themselves. ( )