The Third Macabre Megapack (37 page)

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

GRANT ALLEN
(1848-1899) was a Canadian science writer and novelist, and a successful upholder of the theory of evolution. He was also a pioneer in science fiction, with the 1895 novel
The British Barbarians
. This book, published about the same time as H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
(which includes a mention of Allen),[8] also described time travel, although the plot is quite different. His short story “The Thames Valley Catastrophe” (published 1901 in
The Strand Magazine
) describes the destruction of London by a sudden and massive volcanic eruption.

H. F. ARNOLD
(1902 – 1963) was, according to the Weird Fiction Review, “an American pulp-era writer who wrote only three published stories. Despite this low output, ‘The Night Wire’ (1926), first published in
Weird Tales
, is considered the most popular story from the first golden age of that magazine. H.P. Lovecraft is said to have loved this story.”

GERTRUDE ATHERTON
(1857–1948) was a prominent and prolific American author, many of whose novels are based in her home state, California. Her best-seller
Black Oxen
(1923) was made into a silent movie of the same name. In addition to novels, she wrote short stories, essays, and articles for magazines and newspapers on such issues as feminism, politics, and war. She was strong-willed, independent-minded, and sometimes controversial.

J. Y. AYERMAN
(1806–1873) is best known as an English antiquarian specializing mainly in numismatics. He also wrote fiction under his own name and the pseudonym Paul Pindar.

JOHN BUCHAN
(1875–1940) was a Scottish novelist, historian and Unionist politician who served as Governor General of Canada, the 15th since Canadian Confederation. After a brief legal career, Buchan simultaneously began both his writing career and his political and diplomatic career, serving as a private secretary to the colonial administrator of various colonies in Southern Africa. Although best known for his adventure novels, he wrote in many genres, including fantasy and horror.

O. M. CABRAL
(1909-1997) was one of the first genre fantasy and horror writers, appearing in the pulps
Weird Tales
,
Strange Stories
, and
Thrilling Mystery
. She also wrote children’s books and poetry.

HONORÉ DE BALZAC
(1799– 1850) was a French novelist and playwright. His
magnum opus
was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled
La Comédie humaine
, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon Bonaparte. Due to his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, Balzac is regarded as one of the founders of realism in European literature. He is renowned for his multifaceted characters, who are morally ambiguous. His writing influenced many subsequent novelists such as Marcel Proust, Émile Zola, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Eça de Queirós, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Benito Pérez Galdós, Marie Corelli, Henry James, William Faulkner, Jack Kerouac, and Italo Calvino, and philosophers such as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx.

JEAN-MARIE-MATHIAS-PHILIPPE-AUGUSTE, COMTE DE VILLIERS DE L’ISLE-ADAM
(1838–1889) was a French symbolist writer. Villiers’ works, in the romantic style, are often fantastic in plot and filled with mystery and horror.

EDGAR FAWCETT
(1847–1904) was an American novelist and poet. His remarkable novels
Solarion
(about a dog given human intelligence) and
Douglas Duane
(1885, on scientific body-switching) as well as
The Ghost of Guy Thryle
(1895, which has astral projection as a means of interplanetary travel) deserve to be better known.

LAFCADIO HEARN
(1850–1904) is best for his books about Japan, especially his collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories, such as
Kwaidan
and
Some Chinese Ghosts
. In the United States, Hearn is also known for his writings about the city of New Orleans based on his ten-year stay in that city.

W. W. JACOBS
(1863– 1943), was an English author of short stories and novels. Although much of his work was humorous, he is most famous for his horror story “The Monkey’s Paw.”

JEROME K. JEROME
(1859– 1927) was an English writer and humorist, best known for the comic travelogue
Three Men in a Boat
(1889). Other works include the essay collections
Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
(1886) and
Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
;
Three Men on the Bummel
(a sequel to ).

JACK LONDON
(born John Griffith Chaney, 1876– 1916)was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone. Some of his most famous works include
The Call of the Wild
and
White Fang
, both set in the Klondike Gold Rush, as well as the short stories “To Build a Fire”, “An Odyssey of the North”, and “Love of Life.” He also wrote of the South Pacific in such stories as “The Pearls of Parlay” and “The Heathen,” and of the San Francisco Bay area in
The Sea Wolf
.

CATULLE MENDÈS
(1841–1909) was a French poet and man of letters. Of Portuguese Jewish extraction, Mendès was born in Bordeaux. After childhood and adolescence in Toulouse, he arrived in Paris in 1859 and quickly became one of the proteges of the poet Théophile Gautier. He promptly attained notoriety with the publication in the
La Revue fantaisiste
(1861) of his
Roman d’une nuit
, for which he was condemned to a month’s imprisonment and a fine of 500 francs. He was allied with Parnassianism from the beginning of the movement and displayed extraordinary metrical skill in his first volume of poems,
Philoméla
(1863).

OUIDA
(1839– 1908) was the pseudonym of the English novelist Maria Louise Ramé (although she preferred to be known as Marie Louise de la Ramée). During her career, Ouida wrote more than 40 novels, children’s books, and collections of short stories and essays. She was an animal lover and rescuer, and at times owned as many as thirty dogs.

EDGAR ALLAN POE
(1809–1849) was an American author, poet, editor, and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story, and is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre.

MARCEL PRÉVOST
(1862– 1941) was a French author and dramatist. He was born in Paris and educated at Jesuit schools in Bordeaux and Paris, entering the École polytechnique in 1882. He published a story in the
Clairon
as early as 1881, but for some years after the completion of his studies he applied his technical knowledge to the manufacture of tobacco.

BRAINARD GARDNER SMITH
was a popular writer at the turn of the 20th Century. His most successful book was
Reading and Speaking: Familiar Talks to Young Men Who Would Speak Well in Public
.

We have no information on
T. G. ATKINSON,
MORRIS W. GOWEN
HARRY HOW
, and
MARY KEEGAN.