The Night Wire and Other Tales of Weird Media

A mysterious radio signal reports cosmic doom from an otherworldly location. Photography and X-ray evidence suggests there may be some truth to a sculptor’s claim that he has created a god. A spectral projection sows terror amid the flickering light of the cinema. From the whispering wires of the telegraph and ghostly images of the daguerreotype to the disembodied voices of the phonograph and radio, the new technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave their users miraculous new powers – and new nightmares. Tracing this fiction of fear from the 1890s to the 1950s, this collection brings together the best tales of haunted or uncanny media from classic – and unjustly neglected – writers of the supernatural.