The publishing arm of the British Library have plenty of books planned for the first half of 2022, and at least four of them are right up our street. Here are the titles that stood out to us from their spring catalogue.

The Whisperers and Other Stories: A Lifetime of the Supernatural by Algernon Blackwood, ed. Mike Ashley (May 2022). ‘In this collection of his most atmospheric and uneasy tales, Mike Ashley provides the facts of Blackwood’s life which inspired each story – including experiences as an intelligence agent in the First World War and adventures in New York – to tell the parallel tale of the author’s lifelong experience of the supernatural.’

The Ghost Slayers: Thrilling Tales of Occult Detection, ed. Mike Ashley (March 2022). ‘With tales featuring the most prominent psychic detectives such as William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki, the Ghost Finder and Algernon Blackwood’s Dr. Silence, this new collection also includes rare and never-before-reprinted cases investigated by the likes of Flaxman Low, Cosmo Thor, Aylmer Vance and Mesmer Milann.’

The Night Wire and Other Tales of Weird Media, ed. Aaron Worth (April 2022). ‘From the whispering wires of the telegraph and ghostly images of the daguerreotype to the disembodied voices of the phonograph and radio, the new technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave their users miraculous new powers – and new nightmares.

After all, if Graham Bell’s magical device could connect us with loved ones a half a world away, what was to stop it from reaching out and touching the dead – or something worse? Tracing this fiction of fear from the 1890s to the 1950s, this new collection brings together the best tales of haunted or uncanny media from classic – and unjustly neglected – writers of the supernatural.’

Our Haunted Shores: Tales from the Coasts of the British Isles, ed. Emily Napier, Jimmy Packham and Joan Passey (June 2022). ‘In this new collection, the founders of the Haunted Shores Research Network have curated a chilling literary tour of the coasts of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, including tales of woeful shipwreck, lighthouse terrors and uncanny revenants amid the bustle of the harbourside.’

All but the first title are part of their excellent Tales of the Weird series, which has arguably become the gold standard for this sort of collection. If any of the upcoming titles take your fancy, mark your calendar and be ready with your wallet, because those dates will be here in no time.