Randalls Round

Overview

A thrilling collection of strange stories by Eleanor Scott, ranging from depictions of ritualistic folk horror to tales of ancient forces versus humanity. An author who, despite being hugely influential to the Folk Horror and Weird genres, remains relatively unknown with few collections of her work published, Scott has an incredibly varied bibliography, writing Crime Fiction and domestic female-centric narratives.

‘These stories have all had their origins in dreams... Terrifying enough to the dreamer... I hope that some readers will experience an agreeable shudder or two in the reading of them.’

A malignant entity answers the call of an ancient curse on the coast of Brittany; a traveler’s curiosity delivers him to an abominable Hallowe’en ritual; the curious new owner of a haunted mansion discovers something far worse than ghosts in the night.

Randalls Round has long been revered by devotees of the weird tale. First published in 1929, its stories of ritualistic folk horror and M. R. James-inspired accounts of ancient forces terrorizing humanity are thoroughly deserving of wider recognition. This collection includes a new introduction exploring Eleanor Scott’s impact on weird and folk horror fiction, and two chilling stories by N. Dennett – speculated to be another of the author’s pseudonyms.

Author Biography

Eleanor Scott was a pseudonym used by Helen Magdalen Leys (1892–1965), an Oxford-based teacher and author of a handful of novels and short stories. Her debut novel War Among Ladies was published in 1928, followed in 1929 by Randalls Round and the first of two detective novels published under the pseudonym P. R. Shore.

Aaron Worth is professor of Rhetoric at Boston University. He has edited collections of stories by Arthur Machen and Sheridan Le Fanu for the Oxford World Classics series, and was the author of Imperial Media, a study of how advances in media and technology shaped the British Literary Imagination in the late nineteenth century.