Our Haunted Shores Tales from the Coasts of the British Isles

From the unsettling expanses of mud flats to foreboding cliffs and treacherous reefs, the coasts of the British Isles have provided inspiration for storytellers for millennia, creating a rich literary and cultural significance to these spaces in between the land and sea.

The shoreline can be a destination for pleasure, but it is also the rife with peril. In this new collection, the founders of the Haunted Shores Research Network have curated a chilling literary tour of the coasts of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, including tales of woeful shipwreck, lighthouse terrors and uncanny revenants amid the bustle of the harborside.

Jimmy Packham focuses on Gothic fiction and on maritime writing, both as separate and overlapping areas of study. He has a long-standing interest in voice and utterance in literary writing, and his work on the Gothic focuses on the haunted and haunting voices that resonate within late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century American Gothic literature.

Emily Napier is one of the founders of the Haunted Shores Research Network, an organisation exploring horror and Gothic literature based around or inspired by coasts, and aiming to pinpoint the particular appeal and characteristics of the littoral weird. Established in 2020, the research exhibited at the Network’s first symposium in 2021 touched on diverse topics from Victorian smuggling narratives to the enduring appeal of Kaiju cinema.

Joan Passey is a teacher and researcher at the University of Bristol specialising in transhistorical Gothic fiction. She is the author of the forthcoming book Cornish Gothic (University of Wales Press) and she has previously published on Ann Radcliffe, Wilkie Collins and Shirley Jackson.