Colonial Horrors

This stunning anthology of classic colonial suspense fiction plunges deep into the native soil from which American horror literature first sprang. While European writers of the Gothic and bizarre evoked ruined castles and crumbling abbeys, their American counterparts looked back to the Colonial era’s stifling religion and its dark and threatening woods.Today the best-known tale of Colonial horror is Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” although Irving’s story is probably best-known today from various movie versions it has inspired. Colonial horror tales of other prominent American authors—Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper among them—are overshadowed by their bestsellers and are difficult to find in modern libraries. Many other pioneers of American horror fiction are presented afresh in this breathtaking volume for today’s reading public. By highlighting these writers for contemporary readers, the book helps bring their names—and their work—back from the dead.Featuring stories by: Cotton Mather, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft, and many more.

Graeme Davis began writing for tabletop role-playing games in the early 1980s and went on to work for almost all of the major publishers in that industry as a writer and editor. Among many other credits, he helped develop Games Workshop’s blockbuster Warhammer dark-fantasy franchise and the 90s Gothic hit Vampire: The Masquerade. Davis moved into the video games industry in the early 1990s and has created more than forty titles as a writer and game designer. His recent work includes the top-grossing 2012 mobile game Kingdoms of Camelot: Battle for the North and two hit games based on Peter Jackson’s movie version of The Hobbit. From 2009 to 2015, Davis was line editor for Colonial Gothic, Rogue Games’ conspiracy-horror game set in early America. He worked on eleven titles which earned 4- and 5-star reviews on Amazon.com and elsewhere. This is his first book. He lives in Lafayette, Colorado.