The Outcast and The Rite

The Australian novelist and playwright Helen de Guerry Simpson (1897-1940) published many supernatural short stories. This new edition selects the best of her unsettling writing, adding some little-known stories to her 1925 collection The Baseless Fabric (1925). Featured stories include:

• `An Experiment of the Dead¿, in which a visitor comes to visit a woman in the condemned cell.
• `Good Company¿, in which a traveller in Italy becomes temporarily possessed of a hitchhiker in her mind.
• `Grey Sand and White Sand¿ is the horrifying story of a landscape artist who sees and paints a different view.
• `The Outcast¿, in which a soldier left for dead in the War takes his revenge on his village.
• `The Rite¿, in which a discontented woman enters a wood, and emerges transformed.

The Introduction is by Melissa Edmundson, the leading scholar of women¿s Weird fiction and supernatural writing from the early 20th century.