The Horror of the Heights & Other Strange Tales

Most readers know Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, the rational detective who epitomized deductive logic. Who could have guessed that Doyle also wrote some of the most wildly imaginative tales of horror and supernatural published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

The Horror of the Heights & Other Strange Tales collects fourteen vintage stories, told as only a master of the Victorian terror tale can tell them. In these sophisticated fictions souls change bodies, monsters haunt the upper atmosphere, séances summon creatures from the astral plane, and mummies stalk the fog shrouded streets of London. This volume features the best of Doyle’s incomparable tales of the macabre, including:

• “The Captain of the ‘Pole-Star’ ”—In the wild wastes of the arctic, a sea captain confronts the specter of a memory that has haunted him for much of his life.
• “Lot No. 249”—Woe betide the man who crossed Bellingham, a student of Egyptian lore who could reanimate the dead to do his bidding.
•  “The Parasite”—Who was safe from the irresistible Miss Penclosa, a woman who could insert herself into a person’s thoughts and assert her will against their wishes?
• “The Leather Funnel”—Anyone who slept in the room with the antique artifact endured horrible dreams of cruel tortures.
• “The Horror of the Heights”—The first aeronaut to ascend to the stratosphere finds it populated by a species that is alien—and hostile.

Open this book and enter a world of gas-lit thrills and chills, where the most logical thing of all is to be scared.