Product details
- ISBN 9780712369350
- Dimensions: 130 x 190mm
- Publication Date: 21 May 2026
- Publisher: British Library Publishing
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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He looked up at the picture rail, and there was the hand holding on to a hook with three fingers, and slowly scratching the head of the parrot with the fourth.
In 1919, W. F. Harvey published 'The Beast with Five Fingers', his quintessential tale of the disembodied hand with a murderous mind of its own, and its position as one of weird fiction's true classics was cemented by the 1946 film adaptation. Seeking to trace the origins of the haunted hand story back into the nineteenth century, and to showcase its influence on writers of weird fiction from the 1920s to the modern day, horror expert Brian J. Showers presents a new collection of classics from the well-thumbed oeuvres of Sheridan Le Fanu and Guy de Maupassant through to miniature masterpieces from the hands of Jean Ray, Mark Valentine and many more.
Featuring ghostly hands, hands possessed by demons and unexplained hands where no hands should be, prepare to enter a world of nightmares run amok as the vice-grip of terror takes hold.
Brian J. Showers is an award-winning writer, editor and founder of Swan River Press, originally from Wisconsin but now living in Dublin. His short story collection The Bleeding Horse won the Children of the Night award in 2008, while his edited collection of Sheridan Le Fanu-inspired stories, Dreams of Shadow and Smoke, won a Ghost Story Award in 2014. He is the editor of the influential journal The Green Book, and the Uncertainties series of new weird fiction.
