Barry Eric Odell Pain was born in Cambridge, England in 1864. A graduate of Corpus Christi college, Cambridge, he joined the staff of the Daily Chronicle and Black and White periodicals. He became a regular contributor to the literary magazine The Granta and to Cornhill Magazine, Punch and The Speaker. In keeping with many authors of his era, his literary output was prodigious. Credit for the recognition he eventually achieved is said to have come from endorsements by Robert Louis Stevenson who compared Pain's writings to those of Guy de Maupassant. There is a dark side to some of Pain's writing, although he has been more widely recognised as a parodist and writer of lightly humorous stories. This darker side of Pain's work has resulted in a substantial legacy of supernatural, horror and weird fiction. This is possibly why his work, particularly the very well-known, 'The Undying Thing', was highly regarded by H.P. Lovecraft.

In this, the third volume of Pain's weird fiction readers will discover, '"Bill"', 'Smeath', 'The Widower', 'Zero' and many others.

Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket.