First published October 1923
Twelve spook stories, all previously published during the course of 1922-23. They are as follows [N.B. links lead to blog entries, not to stories]:
"And the Dead Spake ..."
The Outcast
The Horror-Horn
Machaon
Negotium Perambulans
At the Farmhouse
Inscrutable Decrees
The Gardener
Mr Tilly's Séance
Mrs Amworth
In the Tube
Roderick's Story
The book itself is available online here.
The reader of the short story will find in Mr E. F. Benson's volume Visible and Invisible, a series of most thrilling tales. Modern science, reincarnation, and many another subject are cleverly employed by Mr Benson to give that touch of verity and of uncanniness that goes to the making of an enthralling story. The creator of Dodo has not lost his cunning as a teller of a good story, and this volume of short stories will add to his reputation.
~The Courier
[Dundee], 29/11/1923
This is not the type of book one would care to read in a lonely house on a wintry night. And the Dead Spake, the first tale in the volume, is also the best; it relates how a famous surgeon devised an electrical apparatus which, when connected to the speech-centre in the brain of a corpse, caused the dead to utter intelligible words. Negotium Perambulans is the weird narrative of a walking pestilence, while Mrs Amworth is a terrifying but intriguing study in feminine psychology. Spiritualism is the motif of several stories; ghosts, ghouls, and other uncanny visitants confront us on every page.
~Aberdeen Press
and Journal, 31/12/1923
Stories of the supernatural and the terrible. The themes are frightful enough to cause shudders; the treatment in the two or three which we have read is not sufficiently clever to give them first-classrank in their field. It is a difficult type of story, and needs a master.
~The Outlook (US), 16/04/1924
Short stories of the supernatural that succeed in raising every fourth or fifth hair.
~The Bookman's Guide to Fiction, 05/1924
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