GOTHIC NOVELS & NOVELLAS


MACABRE MASTERS         BEST STORIES BY AUTHOR


STORY SUMMARIES & ANALYSES         HORROR FICTION TROPES


FILM ADAPTATIONS         NEW BOOK REVIEWS        HOLIDAY STORIES   

One of Irving’s least well-known ghost stories is perhaps also one of his most interesting and personal. Like “Guests from Gibbet Island,” it is a rare foray into the classic ghost story. Most of his ghost stories end up like “Rip Van Winkle” or “The Bold Dragoon” – in that they purport to tell supernatural histories, but are laced with satire, cheek, and burlesque overtones making them ambiguous, while tales like “Sleepy Hollow” and “The Spectre Bridegroom” are overt farces,

Walpurgis Night—observed on the eve of May 1—sits in that peculiar category of European traditions that feel at once familiar and slightly unsettled, as if they have drifted across centuries without ever fully settling into a single meaning. On the surface, it is tied to the feast of Saint Walpurga, an early medieval abbess whose memory was honored across parts of Christian Europe. Yet alongside this ecclesiastical layer runs a much older and more diffuse set of seasonal cu

Many of James’ best stories are nightmarish wish fulfilments of their author’s own personal fantasies. We see this in “A Warning to the Curious,” where the narrator bewails (“alas! alas!”) the 17th century destruction of an uncovered Anglo-Saxon crown, and proudly crows about laying eyes on one (“I can now say that I have seen an actual Anglo-Saxon crown”), full well knowing that the treasured glimpse cost Paxton his life. We again get a glimpse into James’ personal daydrea

One of Washington Irving’s most deliciously Gothic tales—perhaps rivaled only by The Adventure of the German Student—“Guests from Gibbet Island” would have felt perfectly at home in Tales of a Traveller, whether among the metaphysical “Stories by a Nervous Gentleman” or the piratical “Money-Diggers.” It was published relatively late in Irving’s career as a literary “single” (an unusual format for him) in the aptly named The Knickerbocker. Shortly before his death, it was anth

One of the classic tropes of Gothic fiction is the haunted portrait: the dusty painting of a grim figure in old-fashioned garb, whose eyes gleam in candlelight and seem to follow—or even blink at—the viewer from the shadows. Originally a feature of early Gothic novels, it later became a favorite device among writers of horror and weird fiction: Edgar Allan Poe (“The Oval Portrait”), E. Nesbit (“The Ebony Frame”), Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray), H. P. Lovecraft (Char

Like “Guests from Gibbet Island,” the following tale is both grimmer than Irving’s usual fare and was first published in the Knickerbocker Magazine . Profoundly wistful—melancholy and dreamlike—it seems to offer a female-led counterpart to “The Legend of Don Munio de Sancho Hinojosa,” wherein a spectral company is glimpsed performing solemn rites beyond the veil of ordinary life. Here, instead of armored penitents, we encounter a sisterhood of nuns, preserved in sanctity and

H. P. Lovecraft is today enshrined as the architect of cosmic horror—the cold visionary who stripped the universe of comfort and replaced it with vast, indifferent immensities. Alongside later masterpieces like The Call of Cthulhu and At the Mountains of Madness , his name has become virtually synonymous with tentacled gods, forbidden tomes, and existential dread on a planetary scale. The pity is that this reputation has, in some respects, obscured the quieter but no less co

There’s a certain kind of high-concept premise that sounds like a joke until someone executes it well. A vampire loose at Woodstock? On paper, it could go either way—campy throwaway or clever pastiche. SHP Comics' Woodstake , written by Darin S. Cape and illustrated by Felipe Kroll, lands firmly in the latter camp. It’s not just a novelty mashup, but a genuinely entertaining, visually striking horror-comedy that leans into its absurdity without ever losing control of its craf

The legend of Don Juan – a remorseless seducer, and trickster – goes back to the mid-1600s where it became popularized in Spain. Its most famous adaptations are as a play by the France’s Moliere, an opera by the Austria’s Mozart, and an epic poem by England’s Lord Byron (easily illustrating its pan-European popularity). Even Jane Austen was fascinated by its themes of “Cruelty and Lust.” The story has many, many variations, but these are the most common elements of the plot

Like the fiery Salamander in “The Golden Pot,” Gnomes, in alchemy, are elemental spirits connected to one of the four classical elements of nature – in this case, the bowels of the earth and its inhabitants. Capable of moving through solid earth, known for hoarding or guarding jewels, gold, and mineral deposits, Gnomes had none of the sexiness of Salamanders, intellectualism of Sylphs, or goodwill of Undines. Instead, they were uncouth, miserly tricksters consumed by thoughts

I can say virtually nothing about this story without giving some important elements of the plot away, and while there are some stories in Hodgson’s canon (“Demons of the Sea,” for instance) that I can spoil without much damage, the power of this tale hinges on its mystery. It is – like so many others – the story of a derelict which appears out of nowhere, interrupts the voyage of an earthly-minded merchant ship, and draws it into another dimension – a dimension of misanthropi

Written shortly after “The Doom that Came to Sarnath,” “The Statement of Randolph Carter” continued Lovecraft’s streak of minor hits with what would become one of his most famous short stories – a suggestive, small-scale snapshot that prefigures the structure, scope, depth, and themes of “The Music of Erich Zann.” Like that masterwork – written exactly one year later the following December – “Randolph Carter” revels in the Gothicism of Poe and the weirdness of Dunsany, yet st

The very first of Lovecraft’s mature works, “The Tomb” was written in 1917 at the age of twenty-seven, but not published – perhaps understandably – until he had begun to carve out a reputation with such worthier stories as “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” “The Doom that Came to Sarnath,” and “The Music of Erich Zann.” To be fair, Lovecraft succeeded in publishing a few even more esoteric, self-indulgent works before “The Tomb,” but this is certainly among his stories (com

Like so many of Bierce’s ghost stories – “The Thing at Nolan,” “A Vine on a House,” “Present at a Hanging,” “An Arrest,” etc. – this tale classifies as being of the “murder-will-out” genre. Stories like this are among the oldest in the supernatural canon, and such tales of postmortem revenge are common in European and Appalachian folklore (from which Bierce derived the motifs used here). It also contains another theme frequently recycled throughout Bierce’s oeuvre: domestic v

Steinfeld Abbey is a 10 th century monastery located in west-central Germany near the French border. Although it has no legends of a treasure-hiding, alchemist monk, it would not have been surprising to M. R. James had he unearthed such a tradition while he was inventorying the abbey’s ornate stained glass windows in 1904. From Faust to Frankenstein, German-speaking centers of learning have a long tradition of being associated with scholars who were unsatisfied with the conv

A Guest-Post from Ron Johnson Edgar Allan Poe did not invent horror so much as internalize it. In his fiction, terror does not burst through doors — it seeps through the mind. His stories endure not because of ghosts or murders, but because of obsession, guilt, claustrophobia, and the slow disintegration of reason under pressure. Poe cannot be imitated, but he can be echoed. Across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of writers — many now less familiar than

James’ favorite writer of ghost stories was, of course, J. Sheridan Le Fanu, and few of the former’s tales of terror are more closely modelled after the latter’s style than “The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral.” Le Fanu’s universe was bleak, vicious, and vengeful, and typically involved the gradual stalking and ensnarement of a brazen sinner by the spirit of his victim (or that of some avenging entity). This is most obviously reflected in James’ favorite story of Le Fanu’s, “T

Although he is more closely – and rightfully – associated with weird fiction, fantasy, and sci-fi than with the traditional ghost story, O’Brien’s first speculative tale of mention features a chilling haunting. A classic Victorian-era ghost story, “The Pot of Tulips” presents an Americanization of the classic English genre. The Victorian ghost story was rarely content with mere fright. More often, it served as a moral instrument—a means of probing guilt, particularly the guil

“The Dragon Fang” – which is much less about its titular artifact and far more about a magical duck that mystifies the fools that would attempt to capture it – is a charming little piece of Oriental fantasy. This being said, there is nothing particularly horrifying about it, and the supernatural mechanics – though they deal injuries to the villains of the tale – are mystical rather than hideous. The story nonetheless deserves attention as an early example of American fantasy

“Bohemian” was a title that O’Brien gladly accepted from his friends, and one approved by scholars (his first real biography was subtitled “A Literary Bohemian of the Eighteen-Fifties”). A member of New York City’s blue collar intellectual class, he spent his evenings drinking in the company of Walt Whitman and his cronies at Pfaff’s beer cellar, known for its artistic atmosphere, where the patrons donned the bohemian lifestyle with relish. The term first became popular with

A strange, haunting, and ultimately lovely piece of Gothic poesy, “The Child Who Loved a Grave” stands as one of Fitz-James O’Brien’s most delicate experiments in blending the morbid with the beautiful. The story compares naturally to Poe’s poetic parables and twilight verses—“Shadow,” “Silence,” “Ulalume,” “Annabel Lee,” “Lenore,” and “The Raven”—works in which the ghoulish is intertwined with the lovely, and where sorrow becomes a kind of aesthetic illumination. Though brie

Fitz-James O’Brien occupies a distinctive, if often overlooked, place in nineteenth-century Gothic literature, bridging the spectral introspection of American dark romantics with the folkloric terrors of his Irish heritage. Best known for his macabre short fiction, O’Brien was equally adept as a poet, crafting verse that mingles psychological unease with supernatural spectacle. His Gothic imagination thrives in liminal spaces—between life and death, dream and waking, the mate

The theme of public attention and appearance runs like a bright thread through nearly all of Oscar Wilde’s plays and stories. In The Importance of Being Earnest, it is far more important to be “Ernest” than to be earnest, because the name itself carries an aura of desirability: the illusion is more powerful than the reality. Throughout Wilde’s fiction, reality and illusion—truth and perception—exist in deliberate, often comic conflict. His characters care surprisingly little

Oscar Wilde was fascinated by the concept of duty—not by its nobility, but by its absurdity. He delighted in exposing the ridiculous extremes to which humans will go when they allow social or moral obligation to govern their lives. In his work, duty often becomes a source of comic tension, revealing how blindly adhering to socially constructed expectations can produce outcomes both absurd and unsettling. Wilde presents duty not as a moral compass but as a lens through which h