The Sin-Eater and Other Weird Stories by William Sharp and Fiona Macleod

Available to be inscribed/personalized by cover artist Dan Sauer upon request. Please specify how you'd like it to be signed in the comments section of the order form.

FROM OUR FRIENDS AT HIPPOCAMPUS PRESS!
The Classics of Gothic Horror Series
Edited by S. T. Joshi
Cover art & design by Dan Sauer
Trade paperback - 6x9 inches - 297 pages

Scottish writer William Sharp (1855–1905) had already attained celebrity as a poet, critic, and fiction writer (including such weird stories as “The Gypsy Christ” and “The Graven Image”) when, in the 1890s, he fashioned an alternate literary personality for himself: Fiona Macleod.

Sharp came to believe that the soul of a woman lived within him, and he used this conception to produce an abundance of stories and poems that draw upon ancient Celtic myth. Oftentimes these works ventured into the realms of fantasy, terror, and the supernatural. Most famous is “The Sin-Eater,” an unforgettable story of a man who ritually eats a cake laid upon the body of a dead man, thereby taking away his “sins,” with unexpected and horrifying results.

Other tales, such as “Silk o’ the Kine” and “Ula and Orna,” are tales of romance that end with a supernatural climax. “By the Yellow Moonrock” tells of a woman “who could suck the soul out of a man through his lips.” Still other tales utilize Norse myth to create battle scenes reminiscent of Lord Dunsany and Robert E. Howard.

The work of William Sharp/Fiona Macleod is a distinctive contribution to weird literature. This volume has been edited by S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on the history and theory of weird fiction.

Table of Contents
Introduction, by S. T. Joshi

Stories by William Sharp
The Gypsy Christ
The Graven Image
Poems by William Sharp
The Weird of Michael Scott
The Deith-Tide
The Willis-Dancers
A Dream
The Twin-Soul
The Isle of Lost Dreams
The Death-Child

Stories by Fiona Macleod
The Sin-Eater
The Anointed Man
The Dàn-nan-Ròn
Green Branches
Silk o’ the Kine
The Washer of the Ford
The Last Supper
Cathal of the Woods
Mircath
The Laughter of Scathach the Queen
Ula and Urla
By the Yellow Moonrock
The Herdsman
Appendix
By the Yellow Moonrock [beginning]
Bibliography

The Classics of Gothic Horror series seeks to reprint novels and stories from the leading writers of weird fiction over the past two centuries or more. Ever since the Gothic novels of the late 18th century, supernatural horror has been a slender but provocative contribution to Western literature. Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, the Victorian ghost story writers, the “titans” of the early twentieth century (Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft), the Weird Tales writers, and many others contributed to the development and enrichment of weird fiction as a literary genre, and their work deserves to be enshrined in comprehensive, textually accurate editions. S. T. Joshi, a leading authority on weird fiction, has done exactly that in establishing this series. Using scholarly resources honed over decades of wide-ranging research, he has assembled volumes featuring not only the complete weird writings of the authors in question, but exhaustive bio-critical introductions and bibliographical data.