Polar Horrors Chilling Tales from the Ends of the Earth

“As I moved with stiff legs along the reefs I slipped into the water.It was cold beyond belief–thevery quintessence of deathly Arctic ice, so cold that it seemed to sear and bleach the skin.”

Fired up by the accounts of exploring parties in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers of the weird and supernatural began to construct a literary Arctic and Antarctic in which terrors lay undiscovered in the ice and gateways to bizarre hidden worlds were waiting. From James Hogg’s lurid North Pole narrative of life amongst polar bears in ‘The Surpassing Adventures of Allan Gordon’ to tales of mad science and ghostly visitations among the wind-blown expanse of the southern continent, this new collection showcases a wealth of neglected material and an overlooked niche of literature obsessed with the limits of human experience.

Pulp tales of alien forces emerging from the ice and a battle between hunter and invisible man-eating duck creature drift alongside modern horror from indigenous Arctic voices to show the extent and endurance of the lure of these sublime landscapes.

John Miller is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield. He is the editor of the Tales of the Weird anthologies Tales of the Tattooed: An Anthology of Ink (2019) and Weird Woods: Tales from the Haunted Forests of Britain (2020).

CONTENTS
Introduction
A Note from the Publisher15

NORTH
The Surpassing Adventures of Allan GordonJames Hogg19
The Moonstone MassHarriet Prescott Spofford103
The Captain of the “Polestar”Arthur Conan Doyle121
Skule SkerryJohn Buchan153
The Third InterneIdwal Jones173
Iqsinaqtutalik Piqtuq:The Haunted BlizzardAviaq Johnston183

SOUTH
A Secret of the South PoleHamilton Drummond197
In Amundsen’s TentJohn Martin Leahy217
Creatures of the LightSophie Wenzel Ellis243
Bride of the AntarcticMordred Weir295
GhostHenry Kuttner307
The Polar VortexMalcolm M. Ferguson329

Story Sources 349