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James Paxton Priestley

06 Jun 2025 — 1 min read

Oh, the horror! Photo credit: Rebecca Bathory.

You are visiting Priestley's Tales of the Unexpected, featuring dark and unconventional stories that twist the familiar into the uncanny...

Tales of horror, both mainstream and folk.
Visitations to the world of the weird, especially New Weird.
Haunting and supernatural tales.
Speculative excursions.
A soupçon, or more, of fantasy.
And, as you might expect, tales of the unexpected... in any category.

In fact, a veritable smorgasbord of delightful mixed bites to feast on!

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Jack

[Trigger warning: physical and psychological abuse] Although only nine years of age and small framed, Jack was a sturdy and tough little character who appeared to possess an inexhaustible supply of energy and strength. As such, he was still of the age where this boundless get-up-and-go meant he needed regular

And They Lived Unhappily Ever After: The Anti-Fairy Tale

Introduction In one of the most well-known high fantasy adventure novels of all time, The Lord of the Rings by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, The Lady Galadriel says about the Ring passing out of knowledge that ‘History (of it) became legend, legend became myth.’ We give legend and myth oral

The Wendigo, Algernon Blackwood

[The following is part of the introduction to the 1910 horror novella, The Wendigo, by the English broadcasting narrator, journalist, novelist and short story writer, Algernon Henry Blackwood. The story was first published in The Lost Valley and Other Stories (Eveleigh Nash, 1910). Members of Priestley's Tales of

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving

[The following is part of the introduction to the 1850 short story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by the American author Washington Irving. He wrote it while living in Birmingham, England, and it was included in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., his collection of thirty-four essays and short

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Jack

And They Lived Unhappily Ever After: The Anti-Fairy Tale

The Wendigo, Algernon Blackwood

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving