Fear in the blood

Sheridan Le Fanu and his niece, Rhoda Broughton. Louisa Baldwin and her nephew, Rudyard Kipling. Nathaniel Hawthorne, his son, Julian, and his grand-daughter, Hildegarde. Joan Aiken and her father, Conrad. The greatest storytellers of the weird and uncanny are conduits of the supernatural and macabre, channelling through their writing secret glimpses into the sublime, or into worlds of terror. In this new anthology, Mike Ashley traces the phenomenon of families in which that skill for channelling the weird seems to pass down the bloodlines, cultivating family trees whose output forms a large part of the canon of speculative fiction. Mike’s selection includes a story from each family member in a given lineage – focusing on tales in which family relationships are a core element – to bestow the reader with the chilling gifts of generations of fearful fiction.