A mentally disturbed woman is entrapped in Beltane rituals in the Cumbrian fells; a widower mourning his wife falls beneath the mystic allure of Iona; a quest to the Italian Apennines brings a lonely man to a dread Marian revelation; an alcoholic on a Scottish isle is haunted by a deceased chronicler of local legend; in a small German town a sinister doll discloses truths about a murky family tragedy; an unknown journal by a Victorian travel-writer sends a woman on a grim odyssey to Transylvania; in a childhood holiday paradise a man encounters a demented artist's terrifying legacy.
The protagonists in Peter Bell's stories confront the awesome, the numinous, the uncanny, the lure of genius loci, and landscapes undergoing strange epiphanies.
Contents:
Introduction by Brian J. Showers.
Resurrection.
M. E. F.
The Light of the World.
An American Writer's Cottage.
Inheritance.
A Midsummer Ramble in the Carpathians—long-listed for Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year 2012!.
Nostalgia, Death and Melancholy.
Afterword: Marie Emily Fornario — A Historical Note.
Acknowledgements.
