7/21/26
Reminder, I’m signing from 5pm to 8:30pm today at the Brooklyn Brewery 79 North 11th Street Brooklyn, NY 11249. Come say hi. Bring your books from home and I will sign them. There will also be books available for sale at the event.
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Women In Horror Year: Day 87
Lost Ghosts: The Complete Weird Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
This volume presents the weird fiction of the American writer Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930). Better known for her mainstream writings focusing on the lives of men and women in New England, Freeman was frequently attracted to the weird, and her work culminated in the notable volume The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural (1903). But that book contained only a small number of her weird tales, and this volume for the first time reprints all the weird work written over her long career, including a rare play about the Salem witchcraft, Giles Corey, Yeoman.
Longtime readers will remember that S.T. Joshi thinks I am emblematic of everything that is wrong with modern horror fiction (although, to be fair, he also contends that I had some help from Joe Hill, Laird Barron, Paul Tremblay, Nick Mamatas, Jeff VanderMeer, and others). Those same longtime readers can attest that I leaned into that during the years THE HORROR SHOW WITH BRIAN KEENE was on the air, making Joshi the perfect comedic on-air foil time and time again. But even at the height of all that, I was always quite vocal about my respect toward him in regards to his academic knowledge of the genre. No one living can top it (although I’d bet Darrell Schweitzer could come close), and of those who are departed, only Karl Edward Wagner, John Pelan, or J.F. Gonzalez could give him a run for his money in a trivia contest.
I bring this up because Joshi once again rescues an important author from the brink of obscurity — a danger the vast majority of Horror writers will face at one point or another, and sometimes while they’re still alive and writing — with the publication of Lost Ghosts: The Complete Weird Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, an omnibus edition that delivers exactly what it says on the cover.
Despite using both Stephen King’s Danse Macabre and Karl Edward Wagner’s various columns, articles, and prefaces to his Year’s Best Horror series, Freeman was not on my radar as a teenager or young adult. I’m sure I came across several of her ghost stories at the time, because they were frequently reprinted in anthologies, but my tastes in Horror lay elsewhere as a young man. It wasn’t until probably 2002 or 2003 when J. F. Gonzalez lent me his copy of Freeman’s Collected Ghost Stories (published in hardcover by Arkham House in 1974 and limited to 4,155 copies) that I really came to discover and appreciate her work.
Freeman wrote in many genres and forms — romance novels, children’s stories, poetry and plays, etc, and all of them, including her ghost stories, were subtly imbued with her views as an early feminist. Written in the 1800s and early 1900s, she did this in, what was at the time, unconventional ways, such as making her female characters strong rather than weak, and unreliant on a male protagonist to come along and save the day. While that may sound commonplace now, it was not at the time her work was written and published. She also used her fiction to give voice to the concerns rural American women faced at the time, such as involvement in family finances and a voice in local affairs.
Joshi has collected all of the material available in that long out of print Arkham House edition and topped it off with many more, offering the true first complete and comprehensive collection of all of Frreeman’s contributions to Horror and weird fiction. A must have for any fan of traditional ghost stories, or those interested in the history of women in horror, Lost Ghosts: The Complete Weird Stories of Mary E. Wilkins Freeman is available in paperback from Hippocampus Press.
