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Step right up to the enchanted Ferris wheel whose magical gifts may cost you your life. Gaze upon the man-eating menagerie and the dreadful secrets of Satan's Circus. Enter, if you dare, Mrs. Groby's Chamber of Horrors.
Carnivals and sideshows have long been entwined with the history of horror cinema, but in literature their roots run even deeper. Across decades of uncanny fairground fiction, the Big Top becomes a liminal space where the supernatural collides with humanity's darkest desires. Conjurers, puppeteers, beast tamers, and bloodthirsty crowds gather in performance spaces that feel suspended between worlds.
In this collection of sixteen sensational short stories, Edward Parnell assembles a sinister parade of classic weird tales spanning from Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s to Robert Aickman in the 1960s. Featuring writers such as Gerald Kersh, Ray Bradbury, and Margery Lawrence, this anthology offers a cavalcade of unsettling thrills from some of the finest voices in macabre fiction.
Enter the fairground at your own risk.
Edward Parnell is the author of the award-winning Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country (2019), which was shortlisted for the 2020 PEN Ackerley Prize for memoir and autobiography. He is also the author of the Norfolk-set novel The Listeners (2014).
In 2024, he edited Eerie East Anglia: Fearful Tales of Field and Fen, his first anthology of ghost stories for the British Library's "Tales of the Weird" series. He has taught at both the University of East Anglia and the University of Cambridge.
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Take 20% off your first order
Enter the code below at checkout to get 20% off your first order