If the Dead Knew: The Weird Fiction of May Sinclair

• The Classics of Gothic Horror Series
• Edited by S. T. Joshi
• 297 pp
• Paperback: ISBN 9781614982937
• Cover art by Aeron Alfrey
• Cover design by Daniel V. Sauer

This volume contains the weird stories of May Sinclair (1863–1946), a British writer whose many novels and tales established her as a leading figure in English literature in her time. Her two collections of weird tales, Uncanny Stories (1923) and The Intercessor and Other Stories (1931), contain a number of works that feature her central literary concerns: an emphasis on interpersonal relationships and an intense focus on the shifting psychological states of her characters. Sinclair utilized such central weird motifs as the ghost, the revenant, and psychic transference to underscore her keen insight into human frailty.

Table of Contents

Introduction, by S. T. Joshi

The Intercessor
The Flaw in the Crystal
Fright
The Villa Désirée
The Token
The Victim
Where Their Fire Is Not Quenched
The Nature of the Evidence
If the Dead Knew
The Finding of the Absolute
Jones’s Karma
Heaven
The Mahatma’s Story

Bibliography
 

The Classics of Gothic Horror series seeks to reprint novels and stories from the leading writers of weird fiction over the past two centuries or more. Ever since the Gothic novels of the late 18th century, supernatural horror has been a slender but provocative contribution to Western literature. Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, the Victorian ghost story writers, the “titans” of the early twentieth century (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft), the Weird Tales writers, and many others contributed to the development and enrichment of weird fiction as a literary genre, and their work deserves to be enshrined in comprehensive, textually accurate editions. S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction, has done exactly that in establishing this series. Using scholarly resources honed over decades of wide-ranging research, he has assembled volumes featuring not only the complete weird writings of the authors in question, but exhaustive bio-critical introductions and bibliographical data.