This title presents 13 mini masterpieces from one of the most undeservedly neglected authors of twentieth century strange fiction. Nick Freeman, specialist in Gothic literature at Loughborough University, has selected the contents based on the author’s best work. In the midst of this sudden and wild galloping brain-storm I remembered what Ferrers had said about the candlesticks. There was something sinister and uncanny about them. And I knew with a certainty that if I lay and watched I should see something unbearable. The supernatural tales of A. M. Burrage were recognized by contemporaries such as M. R. James and the critic E. F. Bleiler as some of the most imaginative and cleverly told ghost stories in the English language, and yet today his name haunts the fringes of the genre. Burrage was unafraid to position his ghosts among the trappings of modernity, and his experiments with the genre set him apart from the antiquarian ‘Jamesian’ tradition. Presenting 13 of the author’s best tales from the 1920s and 30s – including accounts of uncanny living wax figures, unsettling timeslips into troubled pasts and Burrage’s horror masterpiece ‘One Who Saw’ – this collection is another step towards restoring A. M. Burrage’s name to the heights of the best writers of supernatural fiction. Alfred McLelland Burrage (1889–1956) was an English author who wrote a huge number of stories for the pulp magazines of the early twentieth century, including ghost and horror fiction, historical romance and adventure tales for younger readers. He also wrote a handful of novels, including a visceral first-hand account of his experience on the battlefields of France, War is War, under the pseudonym ‘Ex-Private X’. Nick Freeman took a BA in English at Leeds University before doing postgraduate work at the University of Bristol. He taught at Bristol, the Open University, and the University of the West of England before coming to Loughborough in 2006. He is an authority on the decadent culture of the 1890s, and the author of two well-received books, Conceiving the City: London, Literature, and Art 1870-1914 (2007) and 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late-Victorian Britain (2011, paperback 2013).   INTRODUCTION Through the Dark Glass During the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, Private A. M. Burrage of the Artists Rifles had some form of premonition he described as seeing “through the Dark Glass”. Shortly before his platoon was to attack the German lines, he recalled in 1930, their commander smiled at something Burrage said, and “as he smiled, I saw Death looking at me from out of his eyes, and I knew that his number was up.” The bluntness of the trench slang cannot disguise what was obviously a terrifying experience. “I can’t describe what I saw,” Burrage continues. “It was just Death, and it made me afraid in a ghastly, shuddering way. The momentary transfiguration was just as unpleasant as if his features had melted into the bones of a death’s head.” The young officer was killed a few minutes later. The notion of seeing “through a glass, darkly” derives from the Bible (1 Corinthians 13:12) and suggests something of Burrage’s Catholic upbringing. It also places him in a distinguished tradition of super- natural storytelling: Sheridan Le Fanu had reworked the phrase forIn a Glass Darkly(1872), the landmark collection containing his masterpieces “Green Tea” and “Carmilla”. Most importantly however, the incident typi- fies Burrage’s approach to the supernatural, from its everyday language to the way that quotidian realities are suddenly transformed into something sinister and macabre. In his work, ghosts manifest themselves without warning in commonplace surroundings—rented rooms, railway carriages, hotels, a party game, a holiday cottage—and are more likely to be the spirits of the relatively recently departed than malign ancient forces or nameless cosmic horrors. They are therefore quite different from the ghosts conjured by many of his contemporaries. Burrage admired M. R. James (who grudgingly admitted that his stories “keep on the right side” and were “not alto- gether bad”!), but his own fiction was set in a world far removed from the academic antiquarianism of “Casting the Runes” (1911) or the Latin cryptograms of “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” (1904), and his ghosts were more human than the “intensely horrible face ofcrumpled linen” that terrifies the hapless Parkins at the finale of “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad” (1904). Burrage avoided the mysticism of Arthur Machen, the pantheism of Algernon Blackwood, and the dreamy poetry of Walter de la Mare. His writing has something of the briskness of E. F. Benson’s “spook stories”, but his characters are usually less socially elevated (his work shows a notable awareness of the injustices wrought by wealth and class), and he lacks Benson’s enthusiasm for the monstrous. The bioluminescent giant caterpillar of “Negotium Perambulams...” (1923) or the shad