The Complete Tales of the Wonder Club

Tales of the Wonder Club was originally published as three volumes between 1899-1900, all three books are combined into one, in this Leonaur edition. These tales are unusual for late 19th century works; most of the stories are gothic with elements of the supernatural, weird, bizarre, horror or fantasy and some commentators have likened them to the work of J. Sheridan Le Fanu. An acknowledged ‘grandfather of the supernatural,’ Le Fanu’s work was typical of the early to mid-nineteenth century and the author of these volumes has paid homage to the master, in much the same way as did M. R. James, another fine writer of supernatural fiction. The potentially uninspiring pseudonym of the author of these well regarded books, ‘Dryasdust,’ is used humorously, and with a nod to Sir Walter Scott; in fact Dryasdust was not his only nom-de-plume, he also wrote under the name M. Y. Halidom though he was in reality Englishman, Alexander Huth. In the period leading to the outbreak of the Great War, Huth wrote a number of supernatural novels, one of them, coincidentally, with the same title as that classic of the modern ghost story, The Woman in Black.