Night-pieces

the long version

Perhaps no writer of the early 20th century had a better knowledge of London than Thomas Burke (1886-1945), and his collection *Night-Pieces* (1935) contains eighteen of his most haunting tales of that immense city's dark back alleys, shadowy courts, and mysterious houses. In Burke's London, anything might happen. You might turn round a corner and find yourself back in your childhood. A casual drink with a stranger might end with you - quite literally - losing your head. That pale, slightly sinister-looking man sitting across the restaurant might be a murdered corpse, returned from the dead. And those footsteps you hear following you as you walk along a foggy street, faintly lit by gaslight ... well, let's just say you had better not look behind you ... A groundbreaking and undeservedly neglected volume, *Night-Pieces* contains a wide variety of weird and outré tales, ranging from stories of crime and murder to tales of ghosts, zombies, and the supernatural.