Man-Size in Marble and Other Grim Tales

Selected and introduced by Stephen Carver

The draped effigy just behind him worried him again. He had been trying, at the back of his mind, behind the other thoughts, to strangle the thought of it. But it was there—very close to him. Suppose it put out its hand, its wax hand, and touched him. But it was of wax: it could not move. No, of course not. But suppose it did?

Best known as the author of The Railway Children, beloved British children’s writer Edith Nesbit had a morbid fear of the dark. Childhood trauma had also left her haunted by the thought that dead things might return, and copies of the living become horribly animated. These deep-rooted fears are the foundation of her horror and supernatural fiction. Frequently overlooked by readers and biographers, Nesbit’s weird and uncanny stories belong to the ‘Golden Age of the Ghost Story’ – that period from Dickens to M.R. James – and the ‘Female Gothic’, which uses horror as a veiled way to explore anxieties over motherhood, domestic abuse, and female sexuality.

Nesbit’s tales are short, sharp shockers, her delivery vivid, eerie, and unsettling. She wrote about what scared her: ghosts, zombies, ‘things that walk’; madness, murder, and premature burial. This edition collects all her short horror and weird fiction, reproducing her own collection Grim Tales (1893) in its entirety, including ‘Man-size in Marble’, adapted by Mark Gatiss as Women of Stone for the BBC’s 2024 ‘Ghost Story for Christmas’. 

Full contents:

The Ebony Frame

John Charrington’s Wedding

Uncle Abraham’s Romance

The Mystery of the Semi-detached

From the Dead

Man-size in Marble

The Mass for the Dead

Psychical Research

Hurst of Hurstcote

The Judgement: A Broadmoor Biography

Barring the Way

A Perfect Stranger

The Letter in Brown Ink

The Haunted Inheritance

Under the New Moon

The Portent of the Shadow

The Power of Darkness

The House of Silence

The Head

The Pavilion

Lucy

The Third Drug

In the Dark

The Five Senses

Number 17

The New Samson

The Violet Car

The Marble Child

The Haunted House

The Detective

Appendix: The Mummies at Bordeaux