Gothic Fiction
The Shadow Over Innsmouth
Unspeakable monstrousness overhung the crumbling, stench-cursed town of Innsmouth... and folks there had somehow got out of the idea of dyin…
Villette
A quiet, self-reliant, intelligent, 23-year-old woman, Lucy has, as Miss Ginevra Fanshawe asserts, "no attractive accomplishments – no …
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…
The Monk
Matthew Gregory Lewis's The Monk: A Romance is a story of frustrated and unrequited desire between mentor and pupil mixed with elements of t…
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…
Masterpieces of Mystery
'The Listener'First, it was a strange array of cats, then an increasingly mysterious, and then terrifying increase in...happenstances and...…
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…
Wuthering Heights
The story centers on the all-encompassing, passionate, but ultimately doomed love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, and how this un…
A Sicilian Romance
A Sicilian Romance is a Gothic novel by Ann Radcliffe. It was her second published work, and was first published anonymously in 1790. The pl…
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…
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 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 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 Canterville Ghost
A modern American family move into a traditionally drafty and very haunted English mansion. So far so good but anyone knowing Wilde can expe…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…