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“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...

Unlike “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” and “The Black Cat,” Poe’s final two murder tales – “The Cask of Amontillado” and “Hop-Frog” – were revenge fantasies. The previous three murder tales explored the psychological effects of guilt, the unexpected logic of insanity, and the perspective of madness, but the final two of Poe’s murder tales are unequivocal expressions of wish fulfillment. Most critics and historians agree that the real Fortunato was a persona

Arguably the most famous of Poe’s murder tales (and comfortably short for casual readers of literary fiction) “The Tell-Tale Heart” has become a cultural metaphor for the exposure of evil deeds. And yet its nuances are often overlooked. As much as it is a tale of wickedness brought to light, it is also a pocket-sized manifesto on the multifaceted human spirit and an indictment of cheap cultural definitions of insanity. Humanity, Poe proclaims, is not divided into obvious clas

Magnum opus to Poe’s canon, “The Fall of the House of Usher” single-handedly could have ensured his reputation. While others may contend for the title of “Greatest” in the catalogue, the influence of “Usher” is unquestionable. Nearly all of the principle Poesque motifs are present in its atmosphere of palpable anxiety. United here are “Metzengerstein,” “Berenice,” “Ligeia,” “Silence,” and “Shadow.” Here we see the struggles between free will and destiny, idealism and reality,

Many of Poe’s tales can be seen as re-workings of previous works: “MS.” becomes “Maelström,” “Metzengerstein” becomes “Hop-Frog,” “Shadow” becomes “Masque,” “Tell-Tale Heart” becomes “Imp of the Perverse,” and “Berenice” becomes “Tell-Tale Heart” and “Black Cat.” Perhaps the most clearly reworked tale-relationship is that between Morella and her cousin Ligeia. It is not, however, the same story, even though the central theme – the reincarnation of a Germanic mystic in the bod

You have read Poe before. I say that with the authority of someone who was brought up in the American public education system. You have...

O’Brien has not been called the “Celtic Poe” without cause. Among the most famous of his works (after “What Was It?”), “The Diamond Lens” is rich in Poesque imagery and motifs, and yet it maintains a unique originality that secures its reputation as a science fiction masterwork. The genre’s chief theme in the three centuries following Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis was the discovery of new, often Edenic civilizations through the use of technology or happenstance. Hollow ear