Gothic Fiction
Masterpieces of Mystery
'The Listener'First, it was a strange array of cats, then an increasingly mysterious, and then terrifying increase in...happenstances and...…
Wuthering Heights
The story centers on the all-encompassing, passionate, but ultimately doomed love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, and how this un…
St Andrews Ghost Stories
Seventeen ghost stories (fourth edition published 1921) centered around the ruined medieval cathedral of Saint Andrew in the Scots city of t…
Short Stories
In 1859 Charles Dickens launched a new weekly journal, All the Year Round, to replace Household Words. Elizabeth Gaskell remained a prolific…
Dormant
Dormant is a gothic novel. It begins breezily enough with seven friends starting out in life. Rose, the artist, falls in love with Anthony, …
The House of the Seven Gables
The House of the Seven Gables is a gloomy New England mansion, haunted from its foundation by fraudulent dealings, accusations of witchcraft…
Afterward
Mary and Ned Boyne have fled their dreary life in Wisconsin for a home in rustic Dorsetshire. But you can only run so far, and some things -…
They Return at Evening
The Author of The Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in the preface to one of his books expressed his lively distaste for benevolent ghosts, and …
The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
Five early short stories by Edith Wharton, American author of The House of Mirth. Includes “Kerfol,” “Mrs. Manstey's View,” “The Bolted Door…
Farewell
In his startling and tragic novella Farewell (‘Adieu’), Balzac adds to the 19th century’s literature of the hysterical woman: sequestered, c…
The Phantom Death
This is a book of remarkable nautical ghost and horror stories written by William Clark Russell in 1893. The stories are for the most part s…
Island Nights' Entertainments
A marvelous depiction of two sides of South Sea Islands' life through three separate tales. One, the experience of the incoming British kee…
Northanger Abbey
Northanger Abbey is a hilarious parody of 18th century gothic novels. The heroine, 17-year old Catherine, has been reading far too many “hor…
The Sorrows of Satan
In this 1895 Faustian novel by British author Marie Corelli, we follow the journey of Geoffrey Tempest. Initially a starving and penniless w…
Two Supernatural Stories
Perceval Landon was a journalist and short story author, and in these two tales he explored the supernatural. In ‘Railhead’, a man receives …
The Dark
The Dark is a novella about a desperate young man, a “terrorist and nihilist”, trying to avoid arrest by taking refuge in a brothel. The sto…
Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf
Wagner is a poor, lonely old shepherd living on the edge of the Black Forest. In a devil's pact he gains youth and wealth for the price of t…
Dracula
Dracula as written by Bram Stoker in 1897 was not the first depiction of vampires and other such creatures, Gothic horror stories had been a…
The Lady of the Shroud
As the title suggests, this work does flirt with the supernatural. Yet it is essentially a political novel—a utopian experiment in a fictiti…
The Last of the Valerii
An unnamed American painter resident in Rome serves as narrator in this story, watching as his god-daughter Martha, becomes the wife of Prin…