Spores of Doom Dank Tales of the Fungal Weird

From the fungus-webbed House of Usher to the maddening, fungus-like wallpaper of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic tale of madness, and Ray Bradbury’s account of insidious mushroom dispersal via the U.S. postal system, weird fiction has harbored a thriving culture of fungal horrors throughout the past two centuries. With stories of mycological possession alongside dark, pulpy science fiction monstrous fruiting bodies run amok, this new anthology collects the classic with the lost and obscure to trace our fascination with a spore-infested branch of British and American fiction

Aaron Worth is professor of Rhetoric at Boston University. He introduced and edited the Tales of the Weird anthologies Randalls Round and The Night Wire, and was the author of Imperial Media, a study of how advances in media and technology shaped the British literary imagination in the late 19th century.