Overview

William Fryer Harvey (1885-1937), trained as a physician, was an English master of macabre and uncanny short fiction that blends psychological horror with spiritual unease. One of his best-known stories, ""The Beast with Five Fingers,"" sees a mild-mannered scholar inherit the estate of his brilliant but eccentric uncle, only to discover that the dead man's severed hand - preserved in a box - has developed a will of its own. At first a curiosity, it crawls from drawers, terrifies the servants, and slowly tightens its grip on the narrator's nerves with each passing night, tormenting its keeper with escalating dread. Harvey builds the tension with clinical precision until the hand, aflame and flailing, turns its final gesture into a pyre of madness, where the only question that remains is: is it truly gone?

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Reviews

""One of the best."" -The Los Angeles Times ""Of stories which satisfy our primal appetite for cold shivers along our lumbar regions the best is 'The Beast with Five Fingers' by W.F. Harvey, a thing manifestly impossible and absurd in daylight, but a story to be avoided by a person alone in a large house at midnight."" -The New York Herald ""A fantastic, blood-curdling and utterly original horror story."" -Alison Smith, The San Francisco Examiner ""A really admirable ghost story, the gruesome tale of 'The Beast with Five Fingers.'"" -Evening Public Ledger ""Uncanny and repulsive, but absorbing at the same time."" -The Indianapolis News ""'The Beast with Five Fingers, ' told by Mr. W.F. Harvey, is admirably done, with a vivid sense of reserve force which reminds one of Edgar Allen Poe. The cumulative effect of horror is finely managed."" -The Daily Telegraph ""No one who reads the opening chapter will be content until he has reached the end."" -The Evening Standard ""If, like so many readers, one wants the frankly horrible, it is to be found in 'The Beast with Five Fingers' by W.F. Harvey."" -The Observer ""When, however, one is convinced he is reading merely an amusing satire he suddenly finds himself in the grip of a thrilling ghost story on the order of de Maupassant, [who], unlike Poe, is never utterly lawless. He assumes one impossible fact and then proceeds to unfold his story in a thoroughly scientific and convincing fashion. W.F. Harvey has the same terrifying habit of creating something monstrous, but law-abiding; an evil spirit, quite in the German manner. It is to be regretted, however, that only a shrewd person will know when to stop laughing and when to be scared."" -New York Tribune

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