John Metcalfe

John Metcalfe, writing about John Metcalfe in The Penguin Encyclopaedia of Horror and the Supernatural, T.E.D. Klein said that the author's work is marked by "a rare artistry, wit, and intelligence, and by a restraint too often lacking in the genre." Mike Ashley, in Who's Who in Horror and Fantasy Fiction, calls Metcalfe's works "skilful and bizarre," while E.F. Bleiler, in his The Guide to Supernatural Fiction, refers to them as "tense, cryptic stories of brooding supernaturalism" which are now "unjustly forgotten." John Metcalfe's tales of the macabre and the supernatural are amongst the finest in the genre, and are comparable to the stories of such authors as Walter de la Mare, L.P. Hartley, and Robert Aickman. The horrors in his stories are insidious and unnerving, frightening by stealth rather than by violence as they intrude into the quiet lives of ordinary people, who find their worlds shaken by forces they can neither understand nor control. Like the best horror tales of Poe and Le Fanu, Metcalfe's narratives are often disturbing accounts of excursions into the "bad lands" of the subconscious mind.

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Nightmare Jack and Other Tales,in The St James Guide to Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers, Brian Stableford wrote: "The neglect into which Metcalfe's work has fallen is very unfortunate; an excellent eclectic collection could be compiled by combining The Feasting Dead with the cream of his short fiction, and it is high time that some such project was attempted." Nightmare Jack and Other Tales does just that. Seventeen of Metcalfe's finest supernatural and macabre works form this splendid collection: from the delicate ambiguity of "The Double Admiral," "The Bad Lands," and "Brenner's Boy," through the nightmare of "Mortmain" and "Beyondaril," to his masterpiece of sustained horror, "The Feasting Dead." This 1998 limited edition hardcover of 500 copies, with a dust jacket illustrated by Douglas Walters, made Metcalfe's work accessible to modern readers and collectors.

Edition Details

• Dust Jacket illustrated by Douglas Walters.
• This is a full clothbound edition limited to 500 copies.

External Links

• John Metcalfe. ISFDB entry for John Metcalfe
• Nightmare Jack and Other Tales. ISFDB entry for Nightmare Jack and Other Tales