Overview

""O'Brien's early death undoubtedly deprived us of some masterful tales of strangeness and terror."" - H. P. Lovecraft An Arabian Night-mare and Others (1848-1854) gathers O'Brien's earliest speculative fiction. The collection opens with the eerie poem ""Forest Thoughts"", a meditation on dark Gothic themes, and concludes with the story ""A Peep Behind the Scenes"", which explores the metaphorical theater of life. Between these bookends, readers will find poems, fragments, and stories that delve into liminal spaces, nightmares, wild fantasies, and the unsettling theme of mental deterioration. This collection showcases O'Brien's early fascination with the blurred boundaries between reality and imagination. This is volume one of a three-volume set of Fitz-James O'Brien's fiction and poetry, the most comprehensive collection of his horror and supernatural writings to date. When taken together, the full set offers valuable introductions for readers of fantastical literature, featuring works never previously collected and some appearing for the first time outside their original publications.

Full Product Details

9781783807840

Table of Contents

Reviews

Praise for the Collected Speculative Works ""Fitz-James O'Brien deserves serious attention for developing some of science fiction's most familiar tropes-among them microcosmic worlds, invisible monsters, time slips, and robots."" - New York Review of Books ""Fitz-James O'Brien's exuberantly morbid stories, set amongst mid-century New York's boarding houses and alleyways, are works of comic skepticism and cosmic messiness . . . [This set] is the most comprehensive attempt yet to situate O'Brien firmly within the canon of 19th-century fantastical literature"" - PopMatters ""Quirky humour and darkly imaginative flourishes . . . a weaver of visionary images--a writer of reveries."" - Supernatural Tales ""Across these three volumes we get to experience a large variety of short stories, poems, and a play, laid out in chronological order by publication date, and we can see how O'Brien developed into a masterful storyteller."" - You're Reading ""Fascinating, elegantly written, quite enjoyable stuff."" - Hellnotes

Author Information

Fitz-James O'Brien (1826/8-1862) was born in Co. Cork, Ireland, and spent his teenage years in Limerick after his mother remarried. Early in life, he published poetry, but soon turned to short fiction, the mode defining his legacy. At twenty-one, he inherited family wealth and moved to London in 1849, where he honed his craft. After squandering his inheritance in three years, he emigrated to America in 1852. There, O'Brien flourished as a writer, following Edgar Allan Poe's influence. He enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War and died in 1862 after being wounded in battle.

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