The Realm of the Unreal

(Via 'A Portrait in Flesh' ) Edgar Allan Poe is the savior of Gothic literature: not only is he largely responsible for salvaging ...

Zofloya; or, The Moor is as much the product of one woman’s palsied, eccentric neurosis as it is the chief example of Matthew Lewis’ influ...

‘I closed my lids, and kept them close, And the balls like pulses beat; For the sky and the sea, and the sea and the sky Lay dead lik...

Greetings, ‘boils and ghouls.’ It seems curious that the resurrection of this blog should fall at the hands of material that, at first...

Gustav Meyrink’s The Golem has, in a very literal sense, rewritten who I am as a person. The labyrinthine philosophy and mystical power of t...

Dracula is the stuff of myth. That this one saturnine, irresistibly purple novel has had such a remarkable impact on the fabric of our li...

‘The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature.’ The Island of Dr. Moreau is a relentlessly disturbing novel—and likely m...

The Turn of the Screw is probably the most widely-analyzed piece of literature to come out of the 1890s (and certainly the most widely-anal...

‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living god.’ The King in Yellow is a book containing ten short stories, four of wh...

The Picture of Dorian Gray is one of the more elegant novels in the Gothic canon; that it is also one of the more sinister is hardly surpris...

Ray Russell’s Gothic work is absolutely the finest the latter half of the 20th Century has to offer in that genre: his tales are theatrica...

Uncle Silas is simultaneously J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s greatest novel and also his most celebrated and widely known—which is a rare combinati...

There are Faustian stories about the Devil and Faustian stories about Faust, but Melmoth the Wanderer transcends the conventions (and the l...

Something that has affected one as profoundly as this novel has affected me is difficult to do justice to in a brief review; but it is harde...

Surely few stranger works of fiction exist in the annals of Romantic literature than William Beckford’s dreamy, opulent, and hypnotically ...

The bleak, ancient, charnel terrors of a Canadian backwood in the loneliness of a brutal winter; the fever-pitch horror of an apartment te...

This blog was suggested by Lovecraft's extended essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature . The title was stolen from an Ambrose Bierce y...