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Some Strange Disturbances: Selected Ghostly Tales by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Hardcover – Tartarus Press – October 2025 – 514 pages

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) was one of the masters of Victorian supernatural fiction, who continues to captivate and chill the reader today. Blending psychological unease with spectral dread, Le Fanu’s tales probe the shadows that lurk just beyond the light of your lamp, where reason falters in the shadows and the uncanny takes hold.

This volume gathers some of Le Fanu’s most celebrated works, including ‘Schalken the Painter’, a tale of art and obsession; ‘The Watcher’, in which sinister forces prey on guilt and vulnerability; and ‘Some Strange Disturbances in an Old House in Aungier-Street’, a tale of haunting steeped in menace. In ‘Green Tea’, perhaps Le Fanu’s most unsettling story, a clergyman’s mind unravels under the gaze of a demonic monkey, while ‘The Haunted Baronet’ evokes an ancestral curse. Among others, the collection includes ‘Carmilla’, the pioneering vampire novella that prefigured Bram Stoker’s Dracula, weaving together seduction and terror.

At once atmospheric and psycho-logically insightful, Le Fanu’s ghost stories are not mere entertainments, but explorations of fear, conscience, and the uncanny forces that taint human experience. This is an essential showcase of the talents of one of the great Gothic storytellers.