Book Description

"There was a slight, sickening noise of tearing… one of the branch-like arms was detaching itself from the surrounding grey masses… The head of the thing — a shapeless grey ball, inclined in my direction."From the fungus-webbed House of Usher to the maddening, fungus-like wallpaper of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic tale of madness, and Ray Bradbury's account of insidious mushroom dispersal via the US postal system, weird fiction has harboured a thriving culture of fungal horrors throughout the past two centuries.With stories of mycological possession alongside dark, pulpy science fiction monstrous fruiting bodies run amok, this new anthology collects the classic with the lost and obscure to trace our fascination with a spore-infested branch of British and American fiction.Stories included:• Sylvia Plath - Mushrooms• William Hope Hodgson - The Voice in the Night• Edgar Allan Poe - The Fall of the House of Usher• Charlotte Perkins Gilman - The Yellow Wall-Paper• H. P. Lovecraft - The Shunned House• H. G. Wells - The Purple Pilaeus• Julia Horatia Ewing - The Fiddler in the Fairy Ring• E. F. Benson - How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery• Clark Ashton Smith - The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis• H. F. Heard - The Great Fog• Robert Aickman - The Stains• Mark Samuels - Cesare Thodol: Some Lines Written on a Wall• Aaron Worth - The Mykophagoi