Houses creak, shudder, moan, whistle, and whine. With eye-like windows and doors that appear, at night, like tunnel entrances to the unknown, houses lend themselves to our primal and persistent sense of living among ghosts. It is not difficult to imagine our ancestors conjuring tales of haunted places as they sat around fires casting shadows on cave walls. Folklore is rife with such stories and it is no wonder that our earliest literature-from a letter written by Pliny the Younger (61-c. 112), in which he describes a haunted villa in Athens to One Thousand and One Nights-include accounts of possessed places and eerie abodes. The notion that houses are repositories of events-even possibly cemeteries of previous occupants-is by no means extinguished by the explanations of toxicologists, physicists, and psychologists. The American folklorist Louis C. Jones observed, "It might be expected that a rational age of science would destroy belief in the ability of the dead to return. I think it works the other way: in an age of scientific miracles anything seems possible." Contemporary tales of haunted houses like The Amityville Horror, The Haunting of Hill House, and Red Rose follow a through line shaped by some of the enduring classics gathered in this collection, among them Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Turn of the Screw," by Henry James and "The Lurking Fear," by H. P. Lovecraft. Includes Ann Radcliff's touchstone essay, "On the Supernatural in Poetry," which posits the difference between terror and horror, along with brief author biographies.

Table of Contents
Ann Radcliffe, On the Supernatural in Poetry
Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Haunted and the Haunters; Or, The House and the Brain
Elizabeth Braddon, At Chrighton Abbey Mary
Bram Stoker, The Judge's House
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall Paper
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
M. R. James, The Mezzotint
Edith Wharton, Afterward
Oliver Onions, The Beckoning Fair One
H. P. Lovecraft, The Lurking Fear

Author: Bram Stoker
Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Warbler Classics
Published: 08/30/2019
Pages: 392
Weight: 0.98lbs
Size: 8.00h x 5.25w x 0.87d
ISBN: 9781733561662

About the Author
Stoker, Bram: - Bram Stoker (1847-1912) was an Irish writer of more than a dozen Gothic novels, most famously Dracula. He began his literary career as the theatre critic for the Dublin Evening Mail and in this capacity met actor and theatre owner Henry Irving. Stoker became the acting manager and business manager of Irving's Lyceum Theatre in London, a post he held for twenty-seven years. The Judge's House (1891) first appeared in a special Christmas issue of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News weekly magazine.James Et Al, Henry: - Henry James (1843-1916) is among the greatest novelists in the English language. The brother of the psychologist William James and diarist Alice James, he lived in England for the greater part of his last forty years and became a British subject in 1915. His storytelling is characterized by masterful descriptions of the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters. In addition to his well known novels, which include The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of a Dove, he was interested in long-form short stories. The Turn of the Screw (1898), a classic example of what he called the nouvelle, is one of the most celebrated haunted house stories of all time.Lovecraft, H. P.: - H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is regarded as one of the most significant twentieth-century writers of weird and horror fiction. He has had a primarily influence on such modern writers in the genre as Alan Moore, Caitlín R. Kiernan, and Neil Gaiman. During his lifetime, however, his letters to editors and stories were published only in pulp and weird fiction magazines and he was never able to support himself as a writer. Instead, he subsisted on a small inheritance that was nearly depleted by the time he died of cancer at the age of forty-six. The Lurking Fear (1922), originally published in serial form, has been adapted numerous times for film.