Böcker av Clemence Housman

The English author Clemence Housman (1861-1959) was the sister of the renowned poet A. E. Housman and the novelist Laurence Housman; but she was a distinguished writer in her own right. In 1890 she published The Were-Wolf, a vibrant exposition of the werewolf motif, in a magazine; it was published in book form in 1896. This novella captures both the terror and the sensuality of this supernatural conception, featuring a female werewolf who exercises a baleful influence on the hapless men she encounters. In 1898, Housman's full-length novel The Unknown Sea was published. This rare work involves another seductive female, the mermaid-like Diadyomene, an elusive figure whom a poor fisherman finds on a remote island near his coastal village. On the very borderline of the weird, The Unknown Sea is a rich and complex work written in an archaic and poetic idiom that enhances its elements of terror and strangeness. The short story "The Drawn Arrow" completes the corpus of Housman's weird output-an ethereal tale possibly set in an imaginary realm and perhaps influenced by the work of Lord Dunsany. Housman, an ardent feminist who was jailed for her protests against the denial of the vote to women, is a forgotten master of weird fiction whose work has waited too long to be resurrected. Now we can all appreciate the power and depth of her writings from the beginning to the end of her career.

Then was there soothing and comforting, washing and binding and a modicum of scolding, till the loud outcry sank into occasional sobs. As she tugged at the door, he sprang across grasping his flask, but Sweyn dashed between, and caught him back irresistibly, so that a most frantic effort only availed to wrench one arm free. With that, on the impulse of sheer despair, he cast at her with all his force. The door swung behind her, and the flask flew into fragments against it. Then, as Sweyn's grasp slackened, and he met the questioning astonishment of surrounding faces, with a hoarse inarticulate cry: "God help us all!" he said. "She is a Werewolf."

Clemence Housman was an author and suffragist best-known for her 1896 novella The Were-Wolf, praised by H. P. Lovecraft for "attain[ing] a high degree of gruesome tension and achiev[ing] to some extent the atmosphere of authentic folklore." Many of the horror stories of monsters and ghouls, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.