Reputations shift with the generations. Once a best-selling novelist, and remarkably prolific in what was a relatively short life, Walpole has since his death been largely neglected. Between 1909 and his death, Walpole wrote thirty-six novels, five volumes of short stories, plays, and three volumes of memoirs. Today, when he is remembered, it is for Rogue Herries, a novel set in the English Lake District, and involving gypsies and high adventure.

Hugh Walpole (1884-1941) was one of the most popular and prolific English authors of his time, best known for his historical fiction and novels for boys. But it was in the field of the macabre and supernatural that Walpole was at his best, and this collection of sixteen tales contains many of his finest, including the classic werewolf story 'Tarnhelm'; the oft-anthologized 'The Little Ghost'; 'The Snow', a chilling story of vengeance from beyond the grave; and perhaps the highlight of the collection, 'The Silver Mask', which one critic has called 'a masterpiece, a classic example of how a...