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NOTES BY M. GRANT KELLERMEYER: Aside from “Carnacki the Ghost-Finder,” Hodgson is probably most famous for what has been referred to as...

Out of the Storm {1909} "Hush!" said my friend the scientist, as I walked into his laboratory. I had opened my lips to speak; but stood silent for a few minutes at his request. He was sitting at his instrument, and the thing was tapping out a message in a curiously irregular fashion—stopping a few seconds, then going on at a furious pace. It was during a somewhat longer than usual pause that, growing slightly impatient, I ventured to address him. "Anything important?" I

NOTE BY M. GRANT KELLERMEYER: One of the few stories in this book to have attracted critical attention outside of the horror world, “The...

NOTE BY M. GRANT KELLERMEYER: While many fans of H. P. Lovecraft assume that Chambers’ influence on him begins and ends with The King in...

NOTE BY M. GRANT KELLERMEYER: A “key” in nautical geography is a low, sandy island that juts out of a sunken reef. This makes the more...

A wintry fantasia of Nature, Death, and the Sublime, “The Glamour of the Snow” features one of Blackwood’s most deceptively disturbing...

“Some Haunted Houses” is easily one of Bierce’s most entertaining series of tales. I recommend it as the ideal Hallowe’en reading choice...

Often considered a parabolic meditation on the invincibility of death – a mere prose expansion of “The Conqueror Worm” – “The Masque of the Red Death” suffers from an underappreciation of its brooding class conflicts. While it is a perfection of Poe’s previous odes to “memento mori” (“Worm,” “Shadow,” “Haunted Palace”), it has also been judged as a “revenge fantasy” on the part of a man who resented his exclusion from the aristocracy (his characters’ almost exclusive upper-cl

With the sole exception of “Carmilla,” “Green Tea” reigns as J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s most widely celebrated and well-known supernatural tale. I know of many people who, when asked if they know anything about Le Fanu, will list these two stories and mention something about “Gothic horror” or “early weird fiction,” drawing comparisons with Poe, M. R. James, and Wilkie Collins. While these good people know a decent amount about “Carmilla” (presuming they have never read it – that

Elizabeth Gaskell – like her protégées Mary E. Braddon and Margaret Oliphant – was a mainstream writer of progressive, social novels who also penned disturbing, feminist ghost stories with a slyly critical perspective of British society. Her fiction explored the unstable nature (and looming doom) of a culture that failed to question the abuses of privilege: industrialists and aristocrats, males, and English nationals. Her tales explored the instability of class-based prejudic

Like her first ghost story, “Nothing But the Truth,” the following tale is an example of Rhoda Broughton’s brilliant ability to infuse the dreadful into the domestic. Another story built on a foundation of witty letters between two women, it is, nonetheless, quite different. The setting is rural, the threat – although suggested by the supernatural – is all too physical: a vicious and sloppy murder at the edge of a reaping hook. In this sense, it also pairs wonderfully with E

In the cold February of 1868, Sheridan Le Fanu's Welsh niece, Rhoda Broughton, published her first ghost story: "The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing But the Truth" -- a chilling episode based on rumors circulating around London firesides about a house in Mayfair (more on that later). Presaging the subtle domestic terrors of Henry James, and the inexplicable violence of William Hope Hodgson, this collection of letters between two affluent women is a century before its time

Poe’s final tale of horror was inspired by two actual events: the first was the social scandal aroused by a spurned woman, and the other was a ghastly event of Medieval French history called the Ball of Burning Men. After the shattering loss of his wife Virginia, Poe blamed her rapid deterioration on a gossip ring that had falsely accused Poe of infidelity and lunacy. Jealous and spiteful after Poe rebuked her “disgusting” attraction to him, Elizabeth F. Ellet and seven of he

In 1810 Hoffmann began teaching music to Julia Marc, the teenaged cousin of one of his close friends. Hoffmann met her when she was twelve – about a year after the death of his infant daughter, and not long after his twelve-year-old niece – who had lived with he and his wife for years – moved out of their house. James McGlathery notes that after these two losses, Julia filled a daughterly hole in Hoffmann’s raw heart, filling “an emotional need for a substitute object of pate

Arguably Dickens’ most famous work, “A Christmas Carol” packs a stunning archetypal power – a relatability without expiration date – that...

One of Hoffmann’s most common motifs – a consistent hallmark of his fiction – is the theme of parallelism. His fantasies are unlike typical fairy tales in that they don’t usually depict wondrous things happening in a wondrous world – one where, for instance, witches, dragons, and gnomes are treated as a matter of course; rather, they build dramatic tension by having a parallel universe of just such wonders invading its drab, realistic twin. In this sense his fiction is both t

As we all know, Arthur Conan Doyle was the most significant contributor to the detective story genre – what Verne and Wells were to...

Raw from her parents’ recent deaths and a crushing divorce, an anthropology professor is now faced with losing her chance at tenure and...

Perhaps Bierce’s most anthologized horror story, “The Boarded Window” has remained a staple of American Gothicism since its publication, though with little commentary. As with so many of his stories, the payoff comes from a twist ending and a moment of dramatic irony, yet little has been said about it other than to say that it merits the attention of high school students because it has a great ending. I have always felt that the story held a certain archetypal potency – that

“GHOST, n. The outward sign of an inward fear” — Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary He was the successor of Edgar Allan Poe and a...

When H. G. Wells first published “The Invisible Man” in 1897, the title alone ensured its success. Invisibility fascinates, attracts, and terrifies. It’s allure rests in the ability to escape notice (and with it criticism, self-consciousness, and the power of the other’s gaze), to be freed from social pressures (to be pretty, dress well, be polite, stay put, etc.), and to have the freedom to enter any unlocked space without challenge. An invisible person can eavesdrop and lea

The canon of science fiction follows a very direct descent. From Thomas More to Johannes Kepler, Francis Godwin, and Cyrano de Bergerac,...

Part “Three Skeleton Key,” part “The Most Dangerous Game,” “The Burial of the Rats” has the distinctive flavor of an Edwardian gentleman’s magazine thriller, and it features all the necessary tropes for this genre: a young man forced to prove his manhood through his mental prowess and physical stamina, a white-knuckled chase scene, last minute escapes, themes of Social Darwinism and Nietzschean philosophy, a sense that the struggle is a coded rite of passage, a distant lover,

I was six years old when I walked into a bookstore in Holland, Michigan with my family and met Dr. Jekyll for the first time. We had...