“The Night Wire and Other Tales of Weird Media” by Aaron Worth

"The Night Wire and Other Tales of Weird Media" by Aaron Worth

"A mysterious radio 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 spectral projection sows terror amid the flickering light of the cinema. A gramophone channels the venomous words of a churlish spirit and its cruel vengeance

From the whispering wires of the telegraph and ghostly images of the daguerreotype to the disembodied voices of the phonograph and radio, the new technologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries gave their users miraculous new powers — and new nightmares. After all, if Graham Bell’s magical device could connect us with loved ones a half a world away, what was to stop it from reaching out and touching the dead — or something worse?

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 classic — and unjustly neglected — writers of the supernatural."