Eerie Tales From the Weird City, the subtitle claims. They're not particularly eerie and there's barely any fog. Of the few stories that do qualify - E F Benson's 'The Chippendale Mirror' is by far the best, though I was surprised at how well Marie Belloc Lowndes' 'The Lodger' stands up, at least in the shorter form included here. Arthur Machen's 'N' is, of course, the masterpiece of weird London, but it's more psychogeography and the whole point is that the key site is outside the turn-of-the-century city in suburban Stoke Newington.
What Elizabeth Dearden has actually compiled for the British Library series is a number of sideways glances at London between the reign of William IV (Spring-Heeled Jack) and the 1950s (the Windrush Generation). Neither Virginia Woolf nor Sam Selvon write weird fiction but I was fascinated by Woolf's 'Street Haunting' and, to a lesser extent, Thomas Burke's description of Soho during World War I. For me the best piece of writing, and the most successful short story, was 'The Demon Lover' by Elizabeth Bowen, which is set against a background of the Second World War. It epitomises the 'abnormal everyday' and possesses a genuine frisson.
