With its iridescent cover adorned with Celtic braiding, this handsomely bound hardcover volume contains prime examples of what editor Johnny Mains calls “the Scottish weird,” a designation that is not, he’s quick to point “a fixed term or a school of writing.” These are “tales written under that church of the supernatural, a boiling pot of weird and cruel, ghastly and grim.”
These 18 stories are arranged chronologically from 1818 to 1976, with helpful, short biographical introductions to the authors, many of whom, no doubt, will be unfamiliar to most American readers. The names of others, like Robert Louis Stevenson, will ring a bell. The volume is intended to introduce readers to writers like Neil M. Gunn, who was well known in Scotland in the middle part of the last century, and whose 1929 story “The Moor” is featured. Two tales translated from Scots Gaelic are included as well. Even what the editor calls “jaded horror [fans]” should find something new in this collection. (Mains is the editor of the British Library anthology "Celtic Weird.") And who can resist stories with titles like “The Murder Hole” (from 1829, by Catherine Sinclair) or “The Curse of Mathair Nan Uisgeachan” (from 1976, by Angus Wolfe Murray).
As Mains suggests in his introduction, the flowering of Scottish short fiction featuring witches, ghosts and merfolk from the 19th century may be seen as a creative reaction against the strains of modernity and the Industrial Revolution, a way of signaling the strength of Scotland’s traditions during times of drastic change. Mains also stresses the influence those tales had on American giants of the genre, like Washington Irving, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
307 pages, hardback. The British Library.
