Spores of Doom. Dank Tales of the Fungal Weird

There was a slight, sickening noise of tearing… one of the branch-like arms was detaching itself from the surrounding grey masses… The head of the thing—a shapeless grey ball, inclined in my direction.

From the fungus-webbed nightmares of the House of Usher to shambling monstrosities zombified by spores, weird fiction has harboured a thriving culture of fungal terrors which continues to exert its influence on the landscape of modern horror.

Bustling with themes of possession, apocalyptic dread and fungal deification, this new selection plucks twelve strange stories and one poem from the past two centuries to trace the terrifying growth of this sub-genre, with uncanny literary morsels from Clark Ashton Smith, Mark Samuels, H. G. Wells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Robert Aickman. [publishers’ note]