Delving deep into the sub-genre of Dark Fantasy, fiction expert Mike Ashley has gathered an unsettling mixture of twisted tales, encounters with logic-defying creatures and nightmarish fables certain to perplex, beguile and of course, entertain.

Strangling vines and meat-hungry flora fill this unruly garden of strange stories, selected for their significance as the seeds of the villainous (or perhaps just misunderstood) `killer plant' in fiction, film and video games.

From the imaginations of Gothic short-story writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mary Shelley and H.P. Lovecraft came one of the most complex of villains - the mad scientist. Promethean Horrors presents some of the greatest mad scientists ever created, as each cautionary tale explores the consequences of pushing nature too far.

"It is my firm opinion that...The Willows is the greatest weird tale ever written." - H.P. LovecraftFrom one of the greatest and most prolific authors of twentieth century weird fiction come four of the very best strange stories ever told.

As the fog thickens and the smoky dark sweeps across the capital, strange stories emerge from all over the city. Waiting in the shadowy streets are tales from writers such as Charlotte Riddell, Lettie Galbraith and Violet Hunt, who delight in twisting the urban myths and folk stories of the city into pieces of masterful suspense and intrigue.

This collection of Vernon Lee's uniquely weird short stories and dark fantasies proves why she was once considered among the best of the genre, and why she deserves to return to those ranks today.

E F Benson's 'spook stories' pushed the boundaries of the ghost story tradition by exploring new, previously 'out of bounds' settings - such as public transport and even hauntings by daylight - to frighten his readers from the 1890s to the 1930s.

This new anthology follows the instrumental contributions made by women writers to the weird tale, and revives the lost authors of the early pulp magazines along with the often overlooked work of more familiar authors.

Welcome to the second new collection of dark Christmas stories in the Tales of the Weird series, ushering in a fresh host of nightmarish phantoms and otherworldly intruders bent on joining or ruining the most wonderful time of the year.