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Over the past four decades, few writers have created a body of work as distinctive - or disturbing - as Stephen Gregory's. In his tales of death and madness the menace usually comes not from the supernatural, but from the natural, and particularly birds, which in Gregory's fiction often bring terror on their dark wings.

Included in this volume are the ghost stories 'The Late Mr Lewis' and 'The Boys Who Wouldn't Wake Up' as well as the macabre 'The Cormorant', which provided the inspiration for Gregory's classic novel of the same name. But not all of the tales in this book are horror stories. The avian-themed entries also include tales like 'To Catch a Thief', in which a series of inexplicable thefts is revealed to have an unexpected culprit and 'The Blackbird's Song', in which a celebrated flute player whose career was cut short by an accident rediscovers music after a visit from a blackbird.

This first-ever collection of the author's short fiction brings together a rich and varied assortment of fourteen tales, including several never before reprinted, four previously unpublished early tales, and two new stories written specially for this volume.

Table of Contents:

• "To Catch a Thief" (1980) short fiction
• "Celandine and Periwinkle" short fiction
• "The Cormorant" (1983) short fiction
• "Twice Bitten" short fiction
• "Lingering" short fiction
• "The Boys Who Wouldn't Wake Up" (2017) short story
• "The Dreaming Pig" short fiction
• "The Theatre Moth" short fiction
• "The Drowning of Colin Henderson" (2017) short story
• "The Late Mr. Lewis" (2017) short fiction
• "The Devil Bird" (1985) short fiction
• "The Blackbird's Song" (1987) short fiction
• "The Progress of John Arthur Crabbe" (1982) short story
• "Dreamcatcher" short fiction

It's David Kewish's eighteenth birthday, but the day doesn't turn out quite as he expected. After suffering a gruesome injury, he receives a strange present in the form of a baby black-backed gull. But David's accident isn't the only misfortune to coincide with the bird's arrival. Soon a whole series of violent incidents, and even deaths, begins to unfold in the seaside town where he lives. And when people notice how close David is to the gull, they begin to suspect he is to blame for the tragedies...

After a bruising experience as a teacher in Africa, Harry Clewe has come to the mountains of Snowdonia in Wales for some peace and quiet. One day, he stops to pick up an attractive blonde hitchhiker... and his life will never be the same again.

A desperate and wild obsession ends in a tragedy that condemns Harry to a solitary existence, a loneliness that bears its own depraved and bitter fruit. In the years that follow, his life is changed by a bizarre and ultimately dangerous succession of women. Driven on from crisis to crisis, from one catastrophe to the next, he knows joy, terror, despair... and finally, the horror of his own worst impulses.

A young family receives a welcome surprise when old Uncle Ian dies and leaves them a cottage in north Wales. For Ian's nephew and his wife Ann, it seems a stroke of incredible good fortune, enabling them to leave their unfulfilling lives in the city for a newfound freedom in the remote seaside cottage. There's just one catch. Uncle Ian's will has a strange condition: the couple must care for his pet cormorant or forfeit the bequest. They think nothing of it at first: Uncle Ian was eccentric, and the bird is amusing in a way. But when the cormorant begins to show a violent and malevolent side, they soon find that Uncle Ian's gift may not be a blessing, but a curse.

Answering an advertisement for a job as live-in tutor to a teenage boy, Christopher Beal arrives at the big, old house deep in the woods with no idea what he's getting into. His pupil is Lawrence Lundy, an odd boy who practices strange rituals by moonlight and is haunted - perhaps literally - by the spirit of his dead father. For mysterious reasons, his mother, Juliet, keeps him at home, isolated from the world. During the suffocating heat of a long summer, Christopher finds himself entangled in the madness of this strange household and must uncover a deadly secret, before it's too late...

Andrew Pinkney is a young English solicitor's clerk with boyish good looks and a gentle manner. But he also has a dark side. When his girlfriend Jennifer laughs at his impotence, he lashes out in a violent rage, knocking her unconscious. At the suggestion of his employer, Andrew heads to an isolated cottage in the dark Welsh countryside to take a break and get a grip on himself. In the woods, he discovers the grotesque stinkhorn mushroom, whose phallic shape seems to rise in obscene mockery of his own shortcomings. But the stinkhorn gives him an idea, a way to win Jennifer back. As the seeds of obsession take root in Andrew's mind, he embarks on a nightmarish quest, with unexpected and horrifying results.

Oliver Gooch comes across a tooth in a velvet box, with a note from 1888 saying it belonged to a young Edgar Allan Poe. When he converts an old church to a bookshop selling strange and occult titles, he displays the tooth there, calling the store Poe's Tooth Books.

But the bookstore has been bought with blood money: Oliver and his wife Rosie received a large cash settlement when their young daughter Chloe was left brain-damaged after a hit-and-run accident. Rosie hopes the child will soon return to normal, but Oliver is secretly relieved by his daughter's condition, dreading that if she recovers she'll reveal a terrible truth about him. Then one freezing night a raggedy, skeletal crow comes into the shop and refuses to leave. The bird infiltrates their lives, altering Oliver and Rosie's relationship and affecting Chloe in strange ways. It becomes a dangerous presence in the firelit, shadowy old church. Inexorably, the family, the tooth, the crow, and their story will draw to a terrifying climax.