Gothic Fiction
The House of the Vampire
The House of the Vampire is a 1907 novella that is a very unusual vampire story. A young writer comes under the powerful influence of a myst…
Weird Tales
This recording includes both volumes of E. T. A. Hoffmann's Weird Tales, a collection of gothic novellas set in Germany, Italy, and some of …
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…
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…
The House on the Borderland
This story helped propel 19th Century gothic fiction in the direction of “cosmic” horror. In fact, H.P. Lovecraft lists it as among his grea…
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…
Olalla
"Olalla" was a "shilling shocker" written for the Christmas season in 1885, just before the publication of Stevenson's D…
Villette
A quiet, self-reliant, intelligent, 23-year-old woman, Lucy has, as Miss Ginevra Fanshawe asserts, "no attractive accomplishments – no …
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 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 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…
Masterpieces of Mystery
'The Listener'First, it was a strange array of cats, then an increasingly mysterious, and then terrifying increase in...happenstances and...…
Farewell
In his startling and tragic novella Farewell (‘Adieu’), Balzac adds to the 19th century’s literature of the hysterical woman: sequestered, c…
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…
Kottō
Kottō contains 20 Japanese stories, collected from different sources and translated by Lafcadio Hearn. The types of stories in this collect…
The Room in the Tower
These stories have been written in the hopes of giving some pleasant qualms to their reader, if by chance, anyone be occupying in their peru…
Wuthering Heights
The story centers on the all-encompassing, passionate, but ultimately doomed love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, and how this un…
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…
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…