Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

After some rather nauseating episodes in Victorian fairy stories fairies became scary again in the late nineteenth century with the writing of men like ‘Fiona MacLeod’ (William Sharp) and, of course, Arthur Machen. Scary fairies were a late Victorian and Edwardian topos and we’ve looked before at the way the tradition developed and some examples. […]

In appalling fevered sleeps during a recent bout of flu – an approximation of hell – Beach dreamt constantly of fairies and witches. This had nothing to do with two fairy horror books he had supplied himself with – Graham Joyce’s The Tooth Fairy (1999) and A Kind of Enchantment (2012) – and everything, instead, […]

Scary Fairies… While Barrie, Nesbit and others were trying to anodize* and castrate fairies c. 1900 out in the wilds of Britain, Man and Ireland there will still those who were terrified of the elfen beggars. This terror finds a little known reflex in the literature of the time. Various authors including Buchan, Machen, Le […]