Release date: December 10, 2017
Subgenre: Horror anthology
About The Ghost Club - Newly Found Tales of Victorian Terror:
Writers never really die; their stories live on, to be found again, to be told again, to scare again.
In Victorian London, a select group of writers, led by Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker and Henry James held an informal dining club, the price of entry to which was the telling of a story by each invited guest.These are their stories, containing tales of revenant loved ones, lost cities, weird science, spectral appearances and mysteries in the fog of the old city, all told by some of the foremost writers of the day. In here you'll find Verne and Wells, Tolstoy and Checkov, Stevenson and Oliphant, Kipling, Twain, Haggard and Blavatsky alongside their hosts.
Come, join us for dinner and a story:
- Robert Louis Stevenson - Wee Davie Makes a Friend
- Rudyard Kipling - The High Bungalow
- Leo Tolstoy - The Immortal Memory
- Bram Stoker - The House of the Dead
- Mark Twain - Once a Jackass
- Herbert George Wells - Farside
- Margaret Oliphant - To the Manor Born
- Oscar Wilde - The Angry Ghost
- Henry Rider Haggard - The Black Ziggurat
- Helena P Blavatsky - Born of Ether
- Henry James - The Scrimshaw Set
- Anton Checkov - At the Molenzki Junction
- Jules Verne - To the Moon and Beyond
- Arthur Conan Doyle - The Curious Affair on the Embankment
Excerpt:
Wee Davie Makes a Friend
Robert Louis Stevenson
Wee Davie Seton was a very sick boy. That, in itself,
is not unusual in the cluster of busy mill towns of Lanarkshire where he was
born and bred; a county of industry, chimneys and brickwork, where lads are put
to work before they have got more sense than schooling by foremen who have
little enough of either.
Davie was not, however, so sorely afflicted
by birth as to be one of the working poor, having had the good fortune to be
born into a wealthy family. The daily toil required to put bread on the table
was something he’d never need to worry about. No, Davie’s sickness was not made
in his father’s spinning mill on the banks of the upper Clyde, but rather came
from having a difficult birthing and suffering too long with insufficient
lungs. Difficulty in taking a breath is indeed a serious problem in those damp
environs of Western Scotland, where you are as likely to meet a cold mist as a
warm heart.
Indeed, wee Davie was deemed to have been
so poorly at birth that it was thought he might not survive his first night—or
his second for that matter, but the lad proved sturdier than he appeared. He
was coddled and doctored through that first winter, at any moment in danger of
slipping away, but better health came with the spring, and once Davie began to
walk he seemed to have put the greater part of his earlier problems behind him.
For several years he had as normal a childhood as any other mill owner’s son,
being schooled in the classics by day and sent to bed early to avoid being any
annoyance to his father. He had no friends—the only other lads of his age in
the town worked in the mill, and Father would not have a son of his mixing with
the workers. Davie had some books, a patient tutor and, not knowing any other
life, was indeed happy enough with his lot.
The full extent of his ailments did not
resurface until the damp winter of ‘85, just after his ninth birthday, which
saw poor Davie taken to bed before Christmas with a fever that refused to be
placated. It was only then that his much reduced lung capacity was truly noted
for the first time.
Davie’s father threw the full weight of
his, not unsubstantial, financial means into an attempt to ensure the lad’s
good health, but no number of doctors, apothecaries, or prayers could make Wee
Davie any better. Through the course of a long spring and early summer the lad
was poked and prodded over most of his painfully thin torso, took more medicine
than he did solid food, and slept a great deal more than he was awake.
Once it became apparent that Davie’s health
was not showing any signs of improvement, and indeed seemed to be failing
rapidly, the lad was dispatched across the country to his uncle, in search of
drier climes and sea breezes. His father’s hope was that a change in Davie’s
circumstances might bring about a change in his constitution.
It is here, along the windswept
southeastern coast of the Firth of Forth, just to the south of the Bass Rock,
where our story starts in earnest. It begins with Davie in a new bedroom,
plagued by the same old ills of bad health and boredom that, far from being
dispelled, had indeed traveled east alongside him.
Amazon
About William Meikle:
I am a Scottish
writer, now living in Canada, with over twenty novels published in the genre
press and over 300 short story credits in thirteen countries. I have had books
published with a variety of publishers including Dark Regions Press, DarkFuse
and Dark Renaissance, and my work has appeared in a number of professional
anthologies and magazines with recent sales to NATURE Futures, Penumbra and
Buzzy Mag among others.
I live in Newfoundland with whales, bald eagles and icebergs for company and when I'm not writing I drink beer, play guitar and dream of fortune and glory.
I don't know where the ideas come from. I'm just glad that they come. It's been over twenty five years now. I think it's enthusiasm that keeps me going. I just love adventure stories with guns, swords, monsters and folks in peril.
I'm just a big kid at heart.
And therein lies my secret. I haven't grown up.
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