The Night Wire is an original anthology exploring a topical issue of how technology has shaped our culture and literature. It features a mixture of popular supernatural authors such as Algernon Blackwood and H. Russell Wakefield along with more unusual names such as Oliver Onions and Stefan Grabiński.

Published to coincide with the British Library’s media-focused Breaking the News exhibition.

A mysterious news signal reports cosmic doom from an otherworldly location. X-ray evidence suggests the impossible truth that a sculptor is becoming one with his creation. A gramophone channels the venomous words of a churlish spirit and its cruel vengeance.

The ground-breaking new technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries delivered their users into a world of unfathomable miracles and fresh nightmares – a world in which pioneers of weird fiction gave expression to the anxieties at the heart of seemingly limitless communication and the capturing of images beyond the human eye.

Tracing this fiction of speculation and fear from the motion photography of the 1890s to 1950s television, this new collection presents seventeen tales of haunted and uncanny media from a range of writers inspired by its ghastly potential, including Marjorie Bowen, H. Russell Wakefield, Mary Treadgold and J. B. Priestley.

Publication date: 31/05/2022

Author: Edited by Aaron Worth

Brand: British Library Publishing

Number of pages: 320

Binding: Paperback

Dimensions: 190 x 130 mm