GOTHIC NOVELS & NOVELLAS


MACABRE MASTERS         BEST STORIES BY AUTHOR


STORY SUMMARIES & ANALYSES         HORROR FICTION TROPES


FILM ADAPTATIONS         NEW BOOK REVIEWS        HOLIDAY STORIES   

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

This is not an artistically rounded-off ghost story[1], and nothing is explained in it[2], and there seems to be no reason why any of it...

“The Shadow” – also published as “The Portent of the Shadow” – is perhaps Nesbit’s worthiest bid for a contribution to the canon of literary ghost stories – that rare genre of powerful, elegant supernaturalism that squats in your imagination for days after you read it, haunts you intermittently for weeks, and disturbs some dark and quiet spot of your soul for the rest of your life. Henry James (“The Jolly Corner,” “The Real, Right Thing,” “The Ghostly Rental”), Edith Wharton

More than “The Great God Pan,” more than “The White People,” more than anything written in The Three Imposters, Machen is best known for a three-page piece of wartime propaganda that perfectly resonated with the British public in a way that would first amuse then later plague him. World War One was in its first year when Machen penned “The Bowmen” and had it published in The Evening News on St. Michael’s Day, 1914. It was, he claimed, inspired by a handful of rumors trickling

“The Opera Ghost really existed…” Such are the opening lines of Gaston Leroux’s Edwardian homage to the Belle Epoque. Pregnant with...

Godfried Schalcken (SHOLL-kin), the Dutch master painter who studied under Gerrit Dou (a leading pupil of Rembrandt), was a difficult and volatile figure—famed not only for his skill but for his irascibility, aloofness, and misanthropic temperament. Yet his art resonates uncannily with the world of J. Sheridan Le Fanu. Both men trafficked in chiaroscuro—both visually and morally—crafting atmospheres where velvety darkness dominates, pierced only by fragile shafts of gleaming,

Second to “The Monkey’s Paw” and the similarly-themed “Jerry Bundler,” “The Toll-House” is Jacobs’ most anthologized horror story, and with good reason. Few haunted house stories have ever been rendered with better attention to mood, suspense, irony, and fear. Algernon Blackwood’s “The Empty House” is perhaps among the best (before the resurgence and Golden Age of the sub-genre with Peter Straub, Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King), and – as it was written the previous year –

Aside from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” no ghost story by Irving has enjoyed the enduring popularity — among both publishers and readers — of “The Adventure of the German Student.” The tale reads uncannily like Edgar Allan Poe (indeed, it seems to anticipate many of Poe’s most morbid preoccupations: Berenice, Ligeia, “Annabel Lee,” The Fall of the House of Usher, “Ulalume,” “The Oval Portrait,” The Oblong Box, and others), with its brooding intellectual

Music has almost always been seen as a sublime expression of the unconscious: singers, players, and composers allow humanity to express and vicariously experience the most complex emotions of our hearts. Amongst these emotions are the spiritual and the aspirational, but close beside them are the carnal and the passionate. Operatic singing, especially, has frequently been interpreted as a sublimation of sexual furor, and prima donnas have stunned the world into a stupor of awe

Carnacki's most celebrated adventure—the first that I ever read (in Henry Mazzeo's Edward Gorey-illustrated anthology Hauntings), and one of only two ever adapted for the screen—is perhaps the strangest ghost story written before Stephen King (himself an admirer of both Hodgson and Carnacki). "The Whistling Room" is no misnomer. Its remarkable fusion of detective fiction, supernatural horror, adventure, mysticism, and the weird is managed with extraordinary confidence, produc

Doyle’s final great horror story is truly a worthy swan song – a tale who’s science fiction maintains a level of effective awe in spite of having been categorically disproven by aviators a mere decade after being written. And indeed the tale is science fiction, fitting snuggly on a shelf between the speculative horror of H. G. Wells which preceded it and the cosmic terror of H. P. Lovecraft which succeeded it. Both authors’ DNA seems to thrive in Doyle’s plot, which resemble

“Cassilda’s Song” opens The King in Yellow, setting the tone for the anthology, and giving us our most liberal taste of what the eponymous play would read like: the nature of its prose and plot, and its atmosphere, mood, and setting. We learn of Carcosa – a blighted planet, city, dimension or state of mind – wrapped in quiet desperation and morbid decadence. It is a region dominated by disturbing contradictions. Its haunted Lake of Hali is composed of “cloud waves,” causing u

Weird Fiction developed early in the Nineteenth Century with the bizarre supernatural annals of Hoffmann, Poe, and O’Brien, but the peak of its philosophy began percolating in the grotesqueries of Arthur Machen (“The White People”), Robert W. Chambers (“The Yellow Sign”), and Ambrose Bierce (“The Damned Thing”), but it can arguably be said to first express its unique worldview in the following tale. Before Lovecraft penned “The Call of Cthulhu” and William Hope Hodgson publi

H. G. Wells’ last truly great piece of short speculative fiction is probably the following tale. After World War One his writing became increasingly didactic, political, and preachy. Following his Darwinist instincts, he began advocating that mankind band together under a universal world order, put aside its potentially self-destructive campaigns of war and commerce, and strive to organize a pure utopia. While his ambitions were noble, they did not lend themselves to creating

“Dracula’s Guest” was provocative almost as soon as it was released in 1914, and it has remained highly controversial since then – increasing in intrigue until roughly the 1970s when a sort of consensus was arrived at by scholars. The primary reason for this debate is the question of what its relationship was to the 1897 novel. There are a variety of ways in which it has been interpreted: 1. As a deleted first chapter which could be read as canonical; 2. As a revised or rejec

Robert Louis Stevenson was raised in a devout Presbyterian household, his father was a devoted Tory, and his family was proud of his trajectory to join the law profession, but in 1867 he attended Edinburgh University, and his parents’ love was deeply tested as their son became increasingly attracted to what they considered radical philosophies. Things came to a boil in 1873 when his father was crushed to learn that his son – a self-described “red-hot socialist” – had embraced

The women of Poe’s tales are often polar opposites from the men who adore them. Like Berenice, the extroverted sensualist (who is mutilated by Egaeus, the reclusive intellectual) they represent what Jung would call the Anima to their male foils: the feminine, communal, earthy element of their own natures which they avoid, deny, or otherwise repress, until they are plunged into schizophrenic relationships with their own bifurcated psyches. These women are poised to provide un

Most famous in O’Brien’s oeuvre is the following episode: “What Was It?” In the original publication (which we have included), references...

In just four pages, Nesbit mastered one of the more overlooked horror subgenres, a brand of fiction – popular with female Victorian writers – which could be called the Cassandra Tale: a dark story involving a clairvoyant vision which is fatefully (and tragically) dismissed. It was a genre to which she would return several other times, but which was almost perfectly performed in this story written as filler for her landmark collection, Grim Tales. This very short sketch – almo

Another frequently anthologized excerpt from The Three Imposters, “The Novel of the Black Seal” leant its pacing and style to M. R. James as well as H. P. Lovecraft. For James’ part, it has an uncanny resemblance to some of his most respected ghost stories (specifically “Count Magnus,” “A Warning to the Curious,” “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” and “A View from a Hill”), virtually inventing the trope of the loner academic whose dis