‘Horror: A Literary History’, edited by Xavier Aldana Reyes, is divided into seven chapters which function as separate essays that can be read without having specific knowledge about the horror genre. If read systematically, the book presents an anthological review which establishes the continuity of the genre from 1764 to the early twenty-first-century.

Patricia Allmer, Emily Brick, and David Huxley’s edited collection ‘European Nightmares: Horror Cinema in Europe Since 1945’ (New York-Chichester: Columbia University Press/Wallflower Press, 2012) is a book with roots that go back to a conference organised by the editors at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2006.

Sarah Burns’s book, ‘Painting the Dark Side’, aims to overturn what we think we know about nineteenth-century American art. Arguing that previous histories of the era have given too much weight to the sunny side of the story, to the grand and nationalistic landscapes of the Hudson River School and the heroic realist canvases of artists such as Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, she offers a corrective.

Marie Mulvey-Roberts presents a vibrant and fascinating study with an impressive scope and scale as it charts the representation and pathologising of the “monstrous” body from the resurgence of the Gothic in the eighteenth-century through to the late-twentieth-century.

The title on the front cover of ‘The Great God Pan and Other Horror Stories’ is set sideways, an inversion that represents perfectly the upside-down weirdness of the Arthur Machen stories collected within.