20 minutes between submitting a query to a prospect agent and receiving a form rejection is close to my previous record, so let’s celebrate with a feast of Gothic tales on my Patreon, shall we?
Born in 1849 in Scotland, James Hume Nisbet is known for his horror stories mostly set in Australia, a place where everything wants to kill you already and the last place on earth needing Gothic to be terrifying. He went to Australia at 16 and stayed approximately seven years, during which he travelled to Tasmania, New Zealand, and the South Sea Islands. He engaged in painting, sketching, writing poetry and stories, and making notes for future work.
Between 1888 and 1905 he published about 40 novels, almost all coloured by his experiences in the Southern Hemisphere. Many of theme were ghost stories. Hathor and Other Poems, the first collection of his poetic endeavour, was published 1905.
This volume collects two short stories and a fairly longer one. The first two are “The Vampire Maid”, another one of those rare stories of its time featuring a female vampire, and a ghost story called “The Old Portrait”. The longer one is “The Haunted Station” and it’s wonderfully Australian. It was published in 1894 in its own collection, The Haunted Station and Other Stories, with illustrations by the author. The text has never been digitised before, to the best of my knowledge, so here’s my personally curated transcription. Free for everybody.
Enjoy!
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