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Its title would also be applicable to “The Story of the Late Mr Elvesham,” but its themes are far less nefarious and far more action-packed. “The Stolen Body” is no misnomer: the plot concerns what we may (with tongue in cheek) call grand theft body. A man has toyed recklessly with his metaphysical condition by leaving his corporeal-self unoccupied and unlocked, and is left stranded in the spiritual world. Part comedy, part thriller, and part parable, Wells responds to the qu

One of the briefest tales in Poe’s oeuvre, “The Oval Portrait” delves into the costs of art, and – more generally – the relationship...

The final entry in James' prolific 1890s period, “The Real Right Thing,” was penned mere months after The Turn of the Screw, and represents one of James’ very shortest tales. Its brevity, however, has not prevented it from becoming one of his most studied and debated ghost stories. Like “The Friend of the Friends,” it lacks the supernatural terror of Lovecraft or Blackwood, but is positively teeming with psychological tension. Written some seventeen years before his own death

In the midst of a starving winter, a cocksure hunter ignores his neighbors’ advice to come down from his lonely cabin on Jawbone Ridge: they avoid the sinister area during the savage winters, but he savors its isolation. But when he and his three hounds are unexpectedly trapped there in a blizzard, he grows desperate for food, and doesn't hesitate to chop off and eat the long tail of a bizarre, cat-like creature he catches in the woods. But the animal wants its tail back, and

“The Leather Funnel” is a very uneasy tale, presaging the queasy fiction of Algernon Blackwood (“The Insanity of Jones”), M. R. James (“The Rose Garden”), and Oliver Onions (“Io”). The stories I’ve associated with these Edwardian masters of the macabre all bear a somber similarity to “The Leather Funnel,” in that they concern visions of the past forced on a hapless victim – either by their proximity to the supernatural, the loss of their senses, or in the worst cases both. Th

“Owl Creek Bridge” is Bierce’s masterpiece. There is almost no scholarly dissent to that argument. Concerning its legacy, fellow Hoosier, Kurt Vonnegut, wrote, "I consider anybody a twerp who hasn't read the greatest American short story, which is '[An] Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,' by Ambrose Bierce. It isn't remotely political. It is a flawless example of American genius, like 'Sophisticated Lady' by Duke Ellington or the Franklin stove." Both in themes and execution it

Irving’s most famous overt supernatural story — and one which makes no apologies for it — emerges, like most of his finest works, from the German literary tradition. In this case, it draws upon the legend of Doctor Faust. Desperately hungry for forbidden knowledge, this semi-historical alchemist was said to have sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for wisdom, power, and magical abilities. According to sixteenth-century German pamphlets, the scholar spent his middle years i

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...