Gothic Fiction
Farewell
In his startling and tragic novella Farewell (‘Adieu’), Balzac adds to the 19th century’s literature of the hysterical woman: sequestered, c…
St Andrews Ghost Stories
Seventeen ghost stories (fourth edition published 1921) centered around the ruined medieval cathedral of Saint Andrew in the Scots city of t…
The Castle of Otranto
The Castle of Otranto is regarded as the first Gothic novel, a genre appealing to a taste for terror and set in a remote past when prodigies…
Kottō
Kottō contains 20 Japanese stories, collected from different sources and translated by Lafcadio Hearn. The types of stories in this collect…
Manfred
Manfred is a dramatic poem in three acts by Lord Byron, and possibly a self confessional work. A noble, Manfred, is haunted by the memory of…
Masterpieces of Mystery
'The Listener'First, it was a strange array of cats, then an increasingly mysterious, and then terrifying increase in...happenstances and...…
Widdershins
Onions wrote several collections of ghost stories, of which the best known is Widdershins (1911). It includes the novella The Beckoning Fair…
Hans of Iceland
Hans of Iceland was written in 1821 and is the very first novel written by young Victor, years before he became the great Hugo. It has all t…
The Necromancers
Following the death of his fiancée, Laurie Baxter becomes consumed by an obsession with the supernatural. Attempting to reach his dec…
Tales and Stories
While Mary Shelley will most likely always be known for her enduring classic of mad science Frankenstein, this collection intends to show th…
They Return at Evening
The Author of The Ghost Stories of an Antiquary in the preface to one of his books expressed his lively distaste for benevolent ghosts, and …
The Landlady
Everything changed when Ordynov, a secluded young thinker, stepped out of his old lodgings in search of another corner. The ailing landlord …
The Sorrows of Satan
In this 1895 Faustian novel by British author Marie Corelli, we follow the journey of Geoffrey Tempest. Initially a starving and penniless w…
The Lady of the Shroud
As the title suggests, this work does flirt with the supernatural. Yet it is essentially a political novel—a utopian experiment in a fictiti…
Rookwood
A rich and complex Gothic-Romance centring on the murky deeds of an ancient family. It is a wonderfully atmospheric piece that combines narr…
Fifty-one Tales
A multitude of very short stories populated with things that lurk in the dark corners of human imagination. Wonderfully crafted and sometime…
Short Stories
In 1859 Charles Dickens launched a new weekly journal, All the Year Round, to replace Household Words. Elizabeth Gaskell remained a prolific…
The Old Ladies
“Quite a number of years ago there was an old rickety building on the rock above Seatown in Polchester, and it was one of a number in an old…
Northanger Abbey
Northanger Abbey is a hilarious parody of 18th century gothic novels. The heroine, 17-year old Catherine, has been reading far too many “hor…
Weird Tales
Paradoxically, it is variety that unites the tales you are about to read. They take place in widely separated countries and historical perio…