FEARSOME FELINES

As it came closer Dick felt that shuddering faintness, which often affected him in the presence of cats, come over him, and he stamped and clapped his hands. At this it turned tail quickly: a sort of dark shadow streaked the garden-wall for a moment, and it vanished.

A mother cat takes revenge for the death of its kitten, a ferocious feline creeps into a princess’s bedchamber at night to drain her blood, a young woman grows whiskers beneath the light of a full moon and frolics on the lawn…

Aloof and haughty, slinking and sometimes sinister, cats are a mainstay of weird fiction for good reason: for all that we love them, they’re unknowable, unpredictable and a little uncanny. And so, cats loom large in this collection that ranges from the sinister stories of Victorian greats such as Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu through to twentieth-century tales from renowned authors Dorothy L Sayers, E F Benson and Gans T Field.

Dr Janette Leaf is a scholar researching Gothic and weird creatures at Birkbeck. She lectures at national and international conferences, and reviews for the British Society for Literature and Science. She was the co-editor of Crawling Horror: Creeping Tales of the Insect Weird, published in the Tales of the Weird series in 2021.