Entertaining

There is a point where old becomes vintage, and I would argue that these stories sit on the dividing line. These tales are not scary. They are not meant to be. People in the late 19th to early 20th century were fascinated with ghosts and the unknown and seemed to pursue stories that were intriguing, unsettling, even spooky; hence, the birth of weird fiction. These were stories from the popular, and respectable, magazines. If you wanted horror, buy a penny dreadful.

The stories have been carefully curated. They are unique as the editor sought to include stories that were never republished. Some were from quite successful writers and the story quality remained reasonably high, with a couple of exceptions.

The audio publisher has made a messy job of logging books into Audible. They have two publisher names (Isis and Isis Publishing Ltd), one series that only includes a segment of that series (British Library Tales of the Weird), and errors in both the titles and book numbering. Makes them hard to find.

The narration was very well performed, and using a variety of narrators is very welcome in a book of short fiction. My only complaint is the presence of the sibilant 'S' that is so common in audio books. Some books are much better, others are much worse in this regard. I think that quality of the audio could be better and reduce the score by one.

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