Spores of Doom: Dank Tales of the Fungal Weird
By (Author) Aaron Worth
British Library Publishing
British Library Publishing
18th June 2025
20th March 2025
United Kingdom
Fiction
Classic horror and ghost stories
Paperback
From the fungus-webbed House of Usher to the maddening, fungus-like wallpaper of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic tale of madness, and Ray Bradbury's account of insidious mushroom dispersal via the US postal system, weird fiction has harboured a thriving culture of fungal horrors throughout the past two centuries.
With stories of mycological possession alongside dark, pulpy science fiction monstrous fruiting bodies run amok, this new anthology collects the classic with the lost and obscure to trace our fascination with a spore-infested branch of British and American fiction.
Aaron Worth is a professor at Boston University, a celebrated editor and a short story writer. He has edited the Tales of the Weird collections Randalls Round and The Night Wire, as well as anthologies by Vernon Lee and Arthur Machen for Oxford University Press.