Oldstyle Tales Press

There are some fantasy books that pull you in with worldbuilding, some that win you over with characters, and some that keep you reading because you desperately need answers. Wrought in Flesh somehow manages to do all three. By the end, I found myself thinking not only about what had happened, but about everything that still felt unresolved in the best possible way. It left me w...

The following story is perhaps most remarkable because we are not sure who wrote it. It was published in the first edition of Mary E. Braddon’s Christmas periodical, The Mistletoe Bough, a fiction magazine which ran successfully for fourteen years, every December, and was liberally graced with ghost stories and tales of the supernatural. In the Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Sto...

Pirates haunted Washington Irving. During his first European tour, his ship was actually hijacked by pirates off the Italian coast, and he was forced to act as a translator between the French-speaking buccaneers and the British crew. Initially, he was disappointed by their short stature, lack of swagger, and dull minds (he was even annoyed that they did not consider any of his l...

The following prose-poem is not nearly as famous or effective as “Nyarlathotep,” but its eerie, nightmarish atmospherics and earnest philosophical message make it surprisingly memorable for so short an episode. One of his “Poe pieces,” this work takes obvious inspiration from Poe’s own prose-poem, “Silence – A Fable.” It is told to a traveler by a demon or djinn living in a tomb...

When Lovecraft penned “The Nameless City” – a month after writing “Nyarlathotep” – he had already depicted several devastated metropolises, each a vast expression of high civilization, each destroyed by the perfidy of some half-evolved, degenerate tribe, and each lost forever, buried under millennia of antiquity. Most famous among these proto-R’lyehs is Sarnath, followed by the ...