The Night Wire: and Other Tales of Weird Media

Description

A mysterious news signal reports cosmic doom from an otherworldly location. X-ray evidence suggests the impossible truth that a sculptor is becoming one with his creation. A gramophone channels the venomous words of a churlish spirit and its cruel vengeance. The ground-breaking new technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries delivered their users into a world of unfathomable miracles and fresh nightmares - a world in which pioneers of weird fiction gave expression to the anxieties at the heart of seemingly limitless communication and the capturing of images beyond the human eye. Tracing this fiction of speculation and fear from the motion photography of the 1890s to 1950s television, this new collection presents seventeen tales of haunted and uncanny media from a range of writers inspired by its ghastly potential, including Marjorie Bowen, H. Russell Wakefield, Mary Treadgold and J. B. Priestley.

Aaron Worth is professor of Rhetoric at Boston University. He has edited the new edition of Randalls Round for the Tales of the Weird series, and was the author of Imperial Media, a study of how advances in media and technology shaped the British literary imagination in the late nineteenth century.