Mrs. Midnight

A TV reality show host helps to restore an East End music hall and uncovers the dreadful secret of Mrs Midnight and her Animal Comedians. . . . A historian travels to Switzerland to ghost the autobiography of an exiled Balkan king and encounters a sinister cult. . . . The Master of an Oxford college tries to introduce a dubious piece of modern sculpture into his college chapel with dire consequences. . . . A strange meeting takes place on a playing field between an officer on leave from the trenches and his former headmaster. . . . The settings and characters in Reggie Oliver's fifth collection of 'strange' stories are as varied and unusual as ever, though, as in previous volumes, the theatre forms the milieu of a number of his tales. But the theatres are not just English ones, in the provinces and the West End: one is on the Black Sea; another in post-colonial Kenya. Themes are equally varied, but underlying all is a deep sense of the spiritual under-currents just below the surface of everyday existence, and the precariousness of 'normality'. Reggie Oliver is an English playwright, biographer and writer of ghost stories. His work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Content: A Piece of Elsewhere / Countess Otho / Meeting with Mike / Minos or Rhadamanthus / Mr. Pigsny / Mrs. Midnight / The Brighton Redemption / The Dancer in the Dark / The Giacometti Crucifixion / The Look / The Mortlake Manuscript / The Philosophy of the Damned / You Have Nothing to Fear.