Vengeful spirits, mysterious revenants and haunted objects stalk the pages of Wilkie Collins' short fiction, and yet his reputation as a sensation and detective novelist has long overshadowed his inventive contributions to the ghost story genre.

Drawing from across the writer's career, Xavier Aldana Reyes presents eight stories of the strange and uncanny to celebrate this lesser-known side of the Collins' imaginative and ground-breaking fiction, guiding the reader into a candlelit night in which unearthly forces - and inescapable doom - lie in wait.

Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was an English playwright and author, most famous today for his classic sensation novel The Woman in White and The Moonstone, which is considered one of the first detective novels in English literature. Aside from these longer works, Collins also wrote numerous short tales for magazines and anthologies, often straying into the macabre world of the ghost story.

Xavier Aldana Reyes is a Reader in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University and a member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. He has edited Horror: A Literary History for British Library Publishing, along with collections of stories by Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, Sheridan Le Fanu and H. P. Lovecraft.