THE FOLIO SOCIETY

'He dashed his questioner across the open space, and, with his hands over his head, fled out of the door like a detected thief' (The Body-Snatcher)

Called to a country inn late at night, a London doctor is brought face to face with the 'foul and unnatural events' of his youth. The title story in this new anthology of Robert Louis Stevenson's short stories, 'The Body-Snatcher' is the quintessential Victorian horror story, a gripping tale of Edinburgh grave-robbers (and the inspiration for the classic Hollywood movie starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi).

Stevenson was a ruthless refiner of his stories - 'I am always cutting the flesh off their bones' - and his mastery of the form lies not only in his page-turning plots and immediacy of style, but in the vivid pictures he creates in the reader's mind. One has only to begin 'A Lodging for the Night' to fall under Stevenson's spell. The snowbound streets of medieval Paris are described so evocatively, so hypnotically - 'the sleeping city was absolutely still: a company of white hoods, a field full of little Alps' - that we walk them with the protagonist, our steps tethered to the scene of a crime. And it is hard not to be emotionally assaulted by 'The Beach of Falesá': the stifling heat of the South Sea island and strange shamanistic rituals contribute to an unforgettable, other-worldly atmosphere of creeping menace and palm-sweating tension. Suspense-filled adventures, eerie ghost stories and haunting psychological thrillers as diverse as 'The Rajah's Diamond', 'The Suicide Club' and 'The Treasure of Franchard' demonstrate Stevenson's brilliantly incisive, occasionally unsettling imagination. It was the range and style of such tales that helped crown Stevenson 'the Prince of Storytellers'.