Darkling Shadows & Midsummer Madness: The Weird Fiction of R Murray Gilchrist

At the start of the 20thC Robert Murray Gilchrist was a celebrated if reclusive writer, able to count the likes of HG Wells amongst his friends and one of the rare few who found a home in the pages of the notorious Yellow Book. Yet, after his death in 1917, he was quickly forgotten and the strange vistas of his eerie tales faded rapidly from view. In this talk, Gilchrist scholar Daniel Pietersen will use newly-unearthed details of the writer's life to explore this change in fortunes and why Gilchrist - a writer who explored the edgelands of Gothic, Decadent and what we would now call Weird fiction - is due a modern-day reader's renewed attention.

Bio

Daniel Pietersen is the editor of I Am Stone: the Gothic Weird Tales of R Murray Gilchrist, part of the British Library's Tales of the Weird series. He is a writer and critic with an interest in how weird and gothic themes are represented across film, literature and videogaming. Daniel's work has appeared in publications like Dead Reckonings, Revenant and Sublime Horror and he is a regular guest lecturer for the Romancing the Gothic project. Daniel lives in a very old house in Edinburgh with a necromancer and pet hellhound.

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