Short Fiction Benson, E. F: Collected Stories of E. F. Benson. V1. 26 Mar 2011

[crutledge]

Edward Frederic Benson (24 July 1867 – 29 February 1940) was an English novelist, biographer, memoirist and short story writer, known professionally as E.F. Benson. His friends called him Fred. Edward Frederic Benson was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury and member of a distinguished and eccentric family. After attending Marlborough and King's College, Cambridge where he studied classics and archaeology, he worked at the British School of Archaeology in Athens. One of our greatest humorists, he achieved great success at an early age with his first novel, Dodo (1893). He was a prolific author writing over a hundred books: serious novels, ghost stories, plays and biographies. But he is best remembered for his Lucia comedies written between 1920 and 1939 and other comic novels such as Paying Guests and Mrs Ames. He became mayor of Rye, the Sussex town that provided the model for his fictional Tilling, from 1934 to 1937.

How Fear Departed from the Long Gallery
At Abdul Ali's Grave
Mrs. Amworth
Between the Lights
The House with the Brick-Kiln
The Man Who Went Too Far
The Bus-Conductor
Caterpillars
And the Dead Spake
The Dust-Cloud
The Cat
The Gardener
The China Bowl
Gavon's Eve
The Horror-Horn
In the Tube
The Confession of Charles Linkworth
Negotium Perambulans
The Other Bed
Outside the Door
The Room in the Tower
The Shootings Of Achnaleish
The Terror by Night
Mr. Tilly's Seance

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[JeremyR]

I admit, I hadn't heard of this guy until I saw him mentioned in H.P. Lovecraft's essay about horror fiction. In that article, he praises Mr. Benson's work.

The weird short story has fared well of late, an important contributor being the versatile E. F. Benson, whose The Man Who Went Too Far breathes whisperingly of a house at the edge of a dark wood, and of Pan's hoof-mark on the breast of a dead man. Mr. Benson's volume, Visible and Invisible, contains several stories of singular power; notably Negotiam Perambulans, whose unfolding reveals an abnormal monster from an ancient ecclesiastical panel which performs an act of miraculous vengeance in a lonely village on the Cornish coast, and The Horror-Horn, through which lopes a terrible half-human survival dwelling on unvisited Alpine peaks.

So if you liked HPL's stuff, this is certainly worth trying.