Gothic Fiction
The Call of Cthulhu
“[The Call of Cthulhu] is a masterpiece, which I am sure will live as one of the highest achievements of literature. Mr. Lovecraft holds a u…
The Lifted Veil
George Eliot’s 1859 novella, The Lifted Veil, departs radically from the grounded realism of her longer and better known works, such as Midd…
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…
Olalla
"Olalla" was a "shilling shocker" written for the Christmas season in 1885, just before the publication of Stevenson's D…
The Phantom of the Opera
Christine Daae was brought up in the Paris Opera house. Her musician father suddenly dies, telling her he will send her an angel of music to…
The Magician
The Magician is a novel by British author W. Somerset Maugham, originally published in 1908. In this tale, the magician Oliver Haddo, a cari…
Villette
A quiet, self-reliant, intelligent, 23-year-old woman, Lucy has, as Miss Ginevra Fanshawe asserts, "no attractive accomplishments – no …
The White People
Literary critics see Arthur Machen’s works as a significant part of the late Victorian revival of the gothic novel and the decadent movement…
The Romance of the Forest
A Gothic novel famously mentioned by Jane Austen in "Northanger Abbey" as an inspiration for the romantic ideals and supernatural …
Frankenstein
This is a classic (gothic) horror story, and one of the earliest examples of science fiction. The main characters are Dr. Frankenstein and h…
The Italian
The love story between a nobleman and a beautiful lady whom he meets in church leads both of them to unexpected places, as many people would…
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 House of the Seven Gables
The House of the Seven Gables is a gloomy New England mansion, haunted from its foundation by fraudulent dealings, accusations of witchcraft…
Sinister House
What is it about that old house down the road that bothers Pierre and his wife Annette so much? The owners, Eric and Julia, seem like nice p…
Madam Crowl's Ghost
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu...was in his own particular vein one of the best story-tellers of the nineteenth century; and the present volume con…
Kottō
Kottō contains 20 Japanese stories, collected from different sources and translated by Lafcadio Hearn. The types of stories in this collect…
Farewell
In his startling and tragic novella Farewell (‘Adieu’), Balzac adds to the 19th century’s literature of the hysterical woman: sequestered, c…
Short Stories
In 1859 Charles Dickens launched a new weekly journal, All the Year Round, to replace Household Words. Elizabeth Gaskell remained a prolific…
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…
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…