“As I moved with stiff legs along the reefs I slipped into the water. It was cold beyond belief – the very quintessence of deathly Arctic ice, so cold that it seemed to sear and bleach the skin.”

Inspired by ground-breaking expeditions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, writers of the weird began to construct a literary Arctic and Antarctic in which terrors lay undiscovered in the ice and gateways to bizarre hidden worlds lay waiting. From lurid Arctic narratives of life amongst polar bears to tales of ghostly visitations within the wind-blown wilds of the southern continent, this new collection uncovers a wealth of neglected material from this niche of literature obsessed with the limits of human experience.

Featuring tales rife with aliens, twisted science and madness spanning from 1837–1946, this anthology also includes a gem of twenty-first century Arctic horror to trace the enduring lure of these sublime and uncanny spaces at the ends of the Earth.

Publication date: 10/11/22