Varla Ventura, fan favorite on Huffington Post’s Weird News, frequent guest on Coast to Coast, and bestselling author of The Book of the Bizarre and Beyond Bizarre, introduces a new Weiser Books Collection of forgotten crypto-classics. Magical Creatures is a hair-raising herd of affordable digital editions, curated with Varla’s affectionate and unerring eye for the fantastic.

Bram Stoker, the master of horror and dark mind behind the most famous vampire novel in history—Dracula—brings us to the edge of our chairs again with a tale of a different variety. Here the horrors are not vampires, nor are they werewolves. Here the horrors are poverty and vicious, snarling rats. A young man finds himself (foolishly) wandering beyond the city walls of 1850s Paris, making his way into the dust piles and garbage gatherings of the paupers. Living among the rags and the war-torn are giant, beady eyed rats. Hideous beasts that clean a dead (or dying) human body down to its skeleton before the flesh is even cold.

Add to that a swampy quagmire and some curious psychic insights, and you have a masterful tale of the macabre that is not for the feint of heart.