A special volume of tales of ghosts and horrors with an often nautical flavour Rarely is a story so well-known and highly regarded that it eclipses the identity of the author who was responsible for creating it. That may be true however of the macabre short story 'The Monkey's Paw'. Written in 1902, it tells of a charmed disembodied monkey paw which has the power to grant three wishes, one of which, imprudently made, unleashes an abomination. This famous story's author was, of course, William Wymark (W. W. ) Jacobs, a British writer and native the dockland area of Wapping in London's East End, whose main body of work was humorous rather than horrific and whose particular taste, perhaps understandably, was for fiction that featured ships and their sailors. Nevertheless, Jacobs penned a respectable collection of chilling supernatural short stories during his long9783347153172