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A drifting couple leave their bustling Chicago neighborhood to photograph a covered bridge outside of the wife's rural hometown....

Blackwood’s most famous ghost story is also one of the most excellent examples of the haunted house genre. It is not a story about ghosts, however; it is a story about fear. Like “The Willows,” “The Empty House” features two adventurers finding themselves locked in a battle for their sanity, desperately employing psychological gambits to maintain their self-control and avoid the madness that runs at them full tilt. Supposedly a relic from Blackwood’s ghost hunting days with t

Anthologies are the sampler flights of literature. When I go to a restaurant with its own microbrewery, I always get the sampler flight:...

He was the greatest American writer of his time: he was a mentor to Poe, Longfellow, and Hawthorne, his country’s first professional...

The Victorian Era was ostensibly one of confidence: confidence in queen and country, in God and duty, in science and virtue. But beneath the solid wainscoting crawled many rats. Wells, whose speculative fiction almost always had a social conscience hammering industriously behind the scenes, knew that the ghost story – a naturally subversive genre – had the potential to expose the vulnerability of British social and philosophical vulnerability, and in “The Red Room,” he does s

Unquestionably, “The Judge’s House” is Stoker’s short fiction masterpiece. Alongside “The Squaw,” “Dracula’s Guest,” and “The Burial of the Rats,” it will remain remembered and celebrated as one of his greatest literary accomplishments. A frequent luminary of horror anthologies, it has become as ubiquitous to editors as “The Body Snatcher,” “The Monkey’s Paw,” “Man-Size in Marble,” “The Signal-Man,” or “The Red Room.” It probes themes common to Stoker’s fiction, but still rel

Some of the novels I review can be described as pleasant, humorous little reads – Gothic but campy, dark but easygoing – and I certainly...

Other than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, none of Stevenson’s horror tales has achieved greater renown than “The Body Snatcher.” The story appears regularly in anthologies of classic terror, standing shoulder to shoulder with “The Judge’s House,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Monkey’s Paw.” It deserves this distinction, for it resists simple classification. The supernatural episode that concludes the story cannot be conclusively labeled a haunting, a vision, a vampire’s return, or a re

Poe’s tales have unique Gothic elements that were mostly born from the disturbing episode that follows. The tropes of hypersensitivity, wasting women, psychosis-blighted genius, premature burial, monomaniac fixations, and gruesome, psychologically-poignant violence trace back to “Berenice” (sounds like “barren-icy”). “Berenice” is the grandmother of the Poe Grotesquerie: it formulates his dark Romantic vision by developing themes and motifs which, while not original in large

M. R. James considered “The Familiar” to be Le Fanu’s greatest ghost story, and incorporated its primary elements thoroughly into his own supernatural tales – today considered amongst the best in the English language: past sins hounding a remorseful wrongdoer; a merciless predator who shifts shapes, fades into crowds, follows closely behind, and tightens his net with increasing violence; an overwhelming sense of loneliness and hopelessness – of being beyond the aid of God; a

The best part of reading Lou Yardley’s excellent werewolf novel, “Hellhound,” is a very basic, very underrated, very underappreciated...

Although “The Monkey’s Paw” is without a doubt Jacobs’ most popular tale the following story is my absolute favorite of his. It also had a profound impression on a young academic who had just recently begun writing his own horror stories. His name was Montague Rhodes James, and we’ll talk more about him in the conclusion. “The Well” is a tremendously dark story – both thematically and artistically. So much shadow covers it. Suggestion reigns in its chilling text, and terror

“Jerry Bundler” is, in all likelihood, Jacobs’ second most famous spook tale other than “The Monkey’s Paw,” which – once you arrive at the ending – is an interesting fact to note. Although “The Toll-House” and “The Well” are more suitable candidates for the genre, there is something about “Jerry Bundler” which grabs the imagination and haunts. More on that later. For the time being a few words on the context within which this story is placed. For the modern audience it teems

“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” remains one of the most pervasive and intriguing ghost stories of all time, and the primary reason for this are its deep roots in possibility – its uncommon connection to real people and places. Dracula and The Phantom of the Opera have lasted so long for similar reasons, but while debates surround the historical connections of those novels, no one debates that Sleepy Hollow is a real place. The sternly beautiful church peering from its perch ab

Aside from “Carnacki the Ghost-Finder,” Hodgson is probably most famous for what has been referred to as his Sargasso Sea Mythos – a series of horror stories set in the still body of water which he viewed as the ultimate setting to illustrate the heartless cruelty of Nature: a slimy, weedy, primordial quagmire rotating grimly like a great, deadly clock in the heart of the North Atlantic. The world’s only sea without a coastline, the Sargasso is 700 miles wide and 2,000 miles

One of James’ darkest tales – exceeding “Romance of Certain Old Clothes” and rivalling Turn – “Owen Wingrave” has been his second-most commented upon ghost story, surpassing even “The Jolly Corner,” and shares the distinction with Turn of the Screw of having been made into a compelling opera by Benjamin Britten. The antithesis of the cycle-breaking Sir Edmund Orme, the spirits who haunt “Owen Wingrave” are hell-bent on preserving a ghastly, centuries-long pattern of destructi

Perhaps the most famous short story featuring the Great Detective – second only to “A Scandal in Bohemia” if at all – “The Speckled Band” was also Doyle’s favorite. When he compiled a list of his twelve favorites, it stood at the top, and remained there when he expanded the list to nineteen several years later. In the twentieth century, Doyle even adapted it into a stage play with some minor differences, and it continues to be one of the most anthologized of Holmes’ episode.

Although the tide has turned somewhat over the last century, historically, the following story was the most famous of all Dickens’ straight forward ghost stories (somewhat undeservingly when compared to the original, weird, and mystifying masterpieces, “The Signal-Man,” “To Be Read at Dusk,” and “The Hanged Man’s Bride”). Before the ascension of M. R. James, it was arguably the grande dame of English spook tales, and continued to be aggressively anthologized until the mid-20t

Today the word “vampire” conjures immediate images of courtly men exuding an aristocratic masculinity – tall, dark, and handsome. Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi, Brad Pitt, Frank Langella. But before Bram Stoker the word “vampire” had an almost universally female connotation: the femme fatale, the lustful seductress. This is patently obvious in the arts, where paintings titled “The Vampire” overwhelmingly feature female subjects: Edvard Munch’s 1893 painting shows a redheaded v

“The Yellow Sign” is simultaneously Chambers’ horror masterpiece and one of the simplest, least layered entries in The King in Yellow: at its core it is a variation of a familiar theme which began with “Repairer,” was reworked in “The Mask,” matured in “In the Court,” and comes full circle in the penultimate and most cripplingly tragic entry in the Carcosa Mythos. “The Demoiselle D’Ys” will close the cycle with a harmonious resonance of peace and pathos, but if that story is

He was the greatest American writer of his time: mentor to Poe, Dickens, and Hawthorne, his country’s first professional author, and a...

Stevenson was obsessed with the duplicity of man, as each of his horror stories will aptly illustrate. He was fixated on the concept of hypocrisy – the man who loudly espouses a nobler worldview but fails to live up to his own lofty standards. Much of this could be said to emanate from his family’s Presbyterian background: with its stern emphasis on predestination, the unconditional perseverance of the Elect, the unavoidable damnation of the lost, the passionate rejection of

In 1837 Poe wrote his only novel: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a discombobulating, unearthly sea adventure involving shipwreck (after shipwreck, after shipwreck), cannibalism, marooning, vicious South Sea natives, piracy, and an ominously cryptic ending. Taking place in the Antarctic, his readers continue to find its origins in “MS. Found in a Bottle.” Regardless of its influence on Poe’s later writing career, “MS.” has proved a potent and haunting story o

Perhaps none of Fitz-James O’Brien’s tales are stranger than “The Lost Room.” A bizarre, unresolved nightmare, the story fuses late Gothic conventions with what would later come to be recognized as the defining traits of the Weird. It is a tale that resists explanation, refusing to ground itself in rational cause or moral resolution. As a result, it feels at once antiquated and uncannily modern, occupying a liminal space between nineteenth-century Gothic romance and the psych