The Adventures of Lady Egeria

Back in print for the first time since its 1585 debut, this grandiloquently ghastly tale of sin and its wages by the otherwise unknown “W.C.” duly claims precedence as the first novel of supernatural horror in the English language. Through an assortment of elaborate narrative, orations, letters, soliloquies, and verse, readers observe the dastardly flatterer Andromus as he poisons Duke Lampanus’s mind with suspicion of his saintly wife Egeria and her friend, Lord Travenna, a familiar plot that may have indirectly influenced Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale by way of Robert Greene’s 1588 romance Pandosto. Things take a fantastical turn when Egeria gives birth to twins, one sporting a golden thumb and the other “beautified with a foot and leg of gold.” Then it gets weirder, with all hell literally breaking loose in inky flights of homicidal night ravens and other unnatural signs and wonders. Editor Moore’s (The Novel: An Alternative History) scholarly yet accessible introduction provides valuable context for contemporary readers, abetted by a handy glossary of such delightful lost coinages as “frounce,” “disgarboil,” “manquellers,” and “preposturations.”