This post is brought to you by Strange Detectives by G. W. Thomas, a collection of detective stories with monsters. Are these Gothic tales? Yes, in the sense that The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) by Arthur Conan Doyle is a Gothic tale. It is also a Mystery and a quasi-Horror tale, but the Gothic runs rampant over the moors.
Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927) by H. P. Lovecraft gets plenty of traction these days as a guide to Horror fiction. As it should. HPL was well-read. But he isn’t the only person who ever read a Gothic novel. For some earlier, and equally qualified experts, I offer you The Supernatural in Modern English (1917) by Dorothy Scarborough, The Tale of Terror (1921) by Edith Birkhead, and The Gothic Bibliography (1940) by Montague Summers . All mention old works of Gothic fun, often the same ones.
The Gothic novel, as opposed to the novel of Horror, flourished mostly in the 1790s with Ann Radcliffe, but there were others that followed like the Late Victorian Gothic writers such as Bram Stoker. Is Dracula a Horror novel or a Gothic novel? Both, of course. This becomes clearer when you look at his last novel The Lair of the White Worm (1911). Such weirdness can only be called Gothic.
I won’t go off and talk about what a Gothic is, except to say, the trend dates back to the boring and rational days of the 1760s, when Horace Walpole thought to write a supernatural tale in an age that rejected the ghostly. I think this is why the Gothic is still so popular today. (Remember the Twilight craze? Walpole and Radcliffe did it two hundred years earlier.) What made the Gothics appealing back then hasn’t really changed. We are just way more sophisticated about it. (I doubt Horace would have recognized his work in a TV show like True Blood but old Bram would have got it.)
Here is a library of these old books in case you haven’t experienced the Gothic in its original form. Be warned, the old readers didn’t have TV, movies, Radio, the Internet. Their attention spans were considerably longer. A good triple-decker novel was meant to last for months. The diction is more challenging and the frights are pretty tame by today’s standards. Despite all that, these books still have much to offer. Robertson Davies, the Canadian master, called them “fruit-caky”. They are old-fashioned in the same way fruit cake is. But just as rich and unusual, too. (Yes, I am a fan. Not everyone is.)
So slice off a chunk of that cake you didn’t finish at Christmas, pull up a good chair next to the fireplace. Turn off the phone and the ‘Net and everything else, get that cat to sit on your lap. And enjoy.
The Castle of Otranto (1765) by Horace Walpole
Vathek (1786) by William Beckford
The Old English Baron (1778) by Clara Reeves
The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) by Ann Radcliffe
A Sicilian Romance (1790) by Ann Radcliffe
The Romance of the Forest (1791) by Ann Radcliffe
The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe
The Monk (1796) by M. G. Lewis
The Italian (1797) by Ann Radcliffe
Wieland or, The Transformation (1798) by Charles Brockden Brown
Arthur Mervyn (1799) by Charles Brockden Brown
Edgar Huntley, or Memoirs of a Sleepwalker (1799) by Charles Brockden Brown
Ormond (1799) by Charles Brockden Brown
The Magus (1801) by Francis Barrett
Tales of Wonder (1801) by M. G. Lewis
Gaston de Blondeville (1802) V1 V2 by Ann Radcliffe
The Subterraneous Passage (1803) by Sarah Wilkinson
Fatal Secrets (1806) by Isaac Crookenden
Zofloya or, The Moor (1806) by Charlotte Dacre
Romantic Tales (1808) by M. G. Lewis
Northanger Abbey (1817) by Jane Austen
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) by Mary Shelley
Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin
Leixlip Castle (1825) by Charles Maturin
Caleb Williams (1831) by William Godwin
St. Leon (1831) by William Godwin
Melmoth Reconciled (1835) by Honore de Balzac
Twice Told Tales (1837) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) by Edgar Allan Poe
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe
The Phantom Ship (1839) by Capt. Marryat
Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Bronte
The String of Pearls (1850) by James Malcolm Rymer
The House of Seven Gables (1851) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Marble Faun (1860) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Strange Story (1861) by Lord Bulwer-Lytton
Zanoni (1862) by Lord Bulwer-Lytton
The House By the Churyard (1863) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Uncle Silas (1864) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
The Dark Woman, or Plot and Passion (1884) by James Malcolm Rymer
Marius the Epicurian (1885) by Walter Pater
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885) by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Snake’s Pass (1890) by Bram Stoker
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) by Oscar Wilde
The Mystery of the Sea (1902) by Bram Stoker
The Invisible Man (1897) by H. G. Wells
The Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903) by Bram Stoker
The Lady of the Shroud (1909) by Bram Stoker
The Phantom of the Opera (1909) by Gaston Leroux
The Lair of the White Worm (1911) by Bram Stoker
Dracula’s Guest & Other Weird Stories (1914) by Bram Stoker
Seven Gothic Tales (1934) by Isak Dinesen
Conclusion
As with all my quintessential libraries, these public domain volumes are offered to fill your days with great books. Will you like every one? Not likely. But this post does offer a quick reference when the mood strikes. If you have to have the missing wife locked in the west tower, or the black veil that hides an undead thing — or is it a dressing dummy? When you want to run the forest with banditti or the subterranean tunnels under the castle, they are all here. Frankenstein’s monster will rise from his slab as Mr. Hyde terrorizes London. (Or is that Jack the Ripper?) The Gothic offers horrific images, mysterious plots and horny barons aplenty. At times it seems all too ridiculous as Catherine Moreland shows in Northanger Abbey then it reels you back in somehow. The Gothic impulse thrives today as it did in 1790. It’s a clever beast, so you never know when it will rear its fearsome head until it is gone…
Mythos Horror at RAGE m a c h i n e
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