Masters of the Weird Tale

English writer John Metcalfe (1891-1965) was a major contributor to weird literature in the early decades of the twentieth century. His two collections, The Smoking Leg and Other Stories (1925) and Judas and Other Stories (1931), contain an array of work. Metcalfe’s work fuses supernatural and psychological horror, and the author is also adept in depicting social and domestic strife. “The Tunnel” is a narrative of psychological horror about a man who perennially seeks to escape from unjust imprisonment. In “Time-Fuse,” an experiment in spiritualism goes wrong at the end. “The Firing-Chamber” tells of a cleric who becomes fascinated with the accidental death of a man in a firing-chamber and undergoes the experience himself. In the 1950s Metcalfe compiled a third volume, The Feasting Dead and Other Stories. Some of these tales venture into the genre of science fiction, while “Beyondaril” is a tale of fate and precognition. This volume collects the complete short fiction of this writer, including numerous previously unpublished stories that Metcalfe wrote late in life.