ALTHOUGH HIS MAJOR WORK was writing about the virtually unknown regions of Tibet and Nepal in the early years of the nineteenth century, Perceval Landon (1868–1927) is the author of this masterpiece, which has been called one of the three most terrifying stories in the English language. Due to its fame and brilliant portrayal of dread and the sense of waking nightmare, it has been frequently anthologized.
Landon was born into a prominent family (a relation was Spencer Perceval, the only British Prime Minister ever to have been assassinated). After graduating from Hertford College, Oxford, he became a barrister. More interested in adventure and journalism, however, he became a special correspondent to The Times (London), covering the Boer War in South Africa (1899–1900), then serving as private secretary to the Governor of New South Wales (1900–1903), after which he took on the role of special correspondent for The Daily Mail in China, Japan, and Siberia (1903). His reportage on the 1903–1904 British mission to Tibet, led by Col. Sir Francis E. Younghusband, which he accompanied, led to his important book, The Opening of Tibet (1905), in which he provides a narrative of the march but also describes what Western eyes first saw. Often political in tone (Landon was powerfully British in his attitudes and judgments), the book also offered insight into the daily lives of Tibetans, including their religion, manners, and customs. His familiarity and expertise in the region resulted in such further books as Lhasa: An Account of the Country and People of Central Tibet (1905), Under the Sun: Impressions of Indian Cities (1906), 1857: In Commemoration of the 50th Anniversary of the Indian Mutiny (1907), and Nepal (1928). The very few works of supernatural fiction that Landon produced in his lifetime were collected in a single volume, Raw Edges (1908).
“Thurnley Abbey” was first published in Raw Edges: Studies and Stories of These Days (London, William Heinemann, 1908).