Description

Helen de Guerry Simpson’s The Outcast and the Rite: Stories of Landscape and Fear, 1925-1938 edited by Melissa Edmundson

Paperback – Handheld Classics – May 2022 – 222 pages

The Australian novelist and playwright Helen de Guerry Simpson (1897-1940) published many supernatural short stories. This new edition selects the best of her unsettling writing, adding some little-known stories to her 1925 collection The Baseless Fabric (1925).

Featured stories include:
‘An Experiment of the Dead’, in which a visitor comes to visit a woman in the condemned cell.

‘Good Company’, in which a traveller in Italy becomes temporarily possessed of a hitchhiker in her mind.

‘Grey Sand and White Sand’ is the horrifying story of a landscape artist who sees and paints a different view.

‘The Outcast’, in which a soldier left for dead in the War takes his revenge on his village.

‘The Rite’, in which a discontented woman enters a wood, and emerges transformed.

The Introduction is by Melissa Edmundson, the leading scholar of women’s Weird fiction and supernatural writing from the early 20th century.