The Doom of the Great City (1880) is one of the first tales of modern urban apocalypse (arguably the very first). 1880s London, "foul and rotten to the very core, and steeped in sin of every imaginable variety," is ravaged by a killer fog, leaving tens of thousands dead, whilst our hero wanders through the ruins searching for his family. The book begins as polemic against the vices of London life, told retrospectively from "Australasia, 1942," but then - crucially - we have the journey "into the very heart and home of Horror itself," the spectacle of a dead city, an astonishing piece of writing. Although this is a novella (fifty pages in the original) Delisle Hay writes with remarkable verve and talent - a true forgotten classic of the science fiction/horror genre, inspiring H.G.Wells and many others.