Strayers From Sheol

In 'Farewell to all Those', the introduction to his 1961 collection STRAYERS FROM SHEOL, H. R. Wakefield stated 'I've written my last ghost story', continuing with the bleak sentence 'I believe ghost story writing to be a dying art.' However, he concluded his introduction on a more cheerful note, urging readers not to be too sure that 'none of the old magic endures'; and the fourteen stories collected in the original edition of the book show Wakefield to have been still very much at the top of his form. Indeed, STRAYERS FROM SHEOL opens with one of the author's finest and most frightening tales, the classic 'The Triumph of Death'. Following Wakefield's death in 1964, a further four of his stories were published in various Arkham House anthologies edited by August Derleth, who had long been a champion of Wakefield's writing. These stories have been included in the present volume, which also incorporates more than four dozen changes to the original STRAYERS FROM SHEOL text that Wakefield noted in the margin of the copy of the book which he presented to his sister Mary. In her introduction, Barbara Roden looks at the stories in STRAYERS FROM SHEOL, and concludes her biographical study of the author—the longest and most complete such biography yet written—with an examination of his later years and second marriage; a marriage which the author kept a complete secret from the rest of his family, and which was not revealed until many years after his death.