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The Horror Beyond Life's Edge: 560+ Macabre Classics, Supernatural Mysteries & Dark Tales

E-BookEPUBePub WasserzeichenE-Book
23204 Seiten
Englisch
e-artnowerschienen am25.10.2018
Are you ready to step over the edge? This grand horror collection contains the greatest supernatural mysteries, gothic novels, dark romances & macabre tales: Bram Stoker: Dracula The Squaw... John William Polidori: The Vampyre James Malcolm Rymer & Thomas Peckett Prest: Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street Washington Irving: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Rip Van Winkle Edgar Allan Poe: The Cask of Amontillado The Masque of the Red Death The Premature Burial Mary Shelley: Frankenstein The Mortal Immortal The Evil Eye Gaston Leroux: The Phantom of the Opera Marjorie Bowen: Black Magic Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray Henry James: The Turn of the Screw The Ghostly Rental... H. P. Lovecraft: The Dunwich Horror The Shunned House... Charles Dickens: The Mystery of Edwin Drood The Haunted House... Wilkie Collins: The Haunted Hotel The Woman in White Richard Marsh: The Beetle Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles The Silver Hatchet... Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Carmilla... Arthur Machen: The Great God Pan... William Hope Hodgson: The Ghost Pirates The Night Land E. F. Benson: The Room in the Tower The Terror by Night... Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Birth Mark The House of the Seven Gables... Thomas Hardy: What the Shepherd Saw The Grave by the Handpost Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights Guy de Maupassant: The Horla Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto William Thomas Beckford: Vathek Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Monk Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho The Italian Théophile Gautier: Clarimonde The Mummy's Foot M. R. James: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary A Thin Ghost and Others Ambrose Bierce: Can Such Things Be? Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories M. P. Shiel: Shapes in the Fire Rudyard Kipling: My Own True Ghost Story The City of Dreadful Night The Mark of the Beast... Stanley G. Weinbaum: The Dark Other Émile Erckmann & Alexandre Chatrian: The Man-Wolf... Amelia B. Edwards: The Phantom Coach... Pedro De Alarçon: The Nail Walter Hubbell: The Great Amherst Mystery Some Real American Ghosts Some Chinese Ghosts...mehr

Produkt

KlappentextAre you ready to step over the edge? This grand horror collection contains the greatest supernatural mysteries, gothic novels, dark romances & macabre tales: Bram Stoker: Dracula The Squaw... John William Polidori: The Vampyre James Malcolm Rymer & Thomas Peckett Prest: Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street Washington Irving: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Rip Van Winkle Edgar Allan Poe: The Cask of Amontillado The Masque of the Red Death The Premature Burial Mary Shelley: Frankenstein The Mortal Immortal The Evil Eye Gaston Leroux: The Phantom of the Opera Marjorie Bowen: Black Magic Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray Henry James: The Turn of the Screw The Ghostly Rental... H. P. Lovecraft: The Dunwich Horror The Shunned House... Charles Dickens: The Mystery of Edwin Drood The Haunted House... Wilkie Collins: The Haunted Hotel The Woman in White Richard Marsh: The Beetle Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles The Silver Hatchet... Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Carmilla... Arthur Machen: The Great God Pan... William Hope Hodgson: The Ghost Pirates The Night Land E. F. Benson: The Room in the Tower The Terror by Night... Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Birth Mark The House of the Seven Gables... Thomas Hardy: What the Shepherd Saw The Grave by the Handpost Jane Austen: Northanger Abbey Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights Guy de Maupassant: The Horla Horace Walpole: The Castle of Otranto William Thomas Beckford: Vathek Matthew Gregory Lewis: The Monk Ann Radcliffe: The Mysteries of Udolpho The Italian Théophile Gautier: Clarimonde The Mummy's Foot M. R. James: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary A Thin Ghost and Others Ambrose Bierce: Can Such Things Be? Present at a Hanging and Other Ghost Stories M. P. Shiel: Shapes in the Fire Rudyard Kipling: My Own True Ghost Story The City of Dreadful Night The Mark of the Beast... Stanley G. Weinbaum: The Dark Other Émile Erckmann & Alexandre Chatrian: The Man-Wolf... Amelia B. Edwards: The Phantom Coach... Pedro De Alarçon: The Nail Walter Hubbell: The Great Amherst Mystery Some Real American Ghosts Some Chinese Ghosts...
Details
Weitere ISBN/GTIN9788026898290
ProduktartE-Book
EinbandartE-Book
FormatEPUB
Format HinweisePub Wasserzeichen
FormatE101
Verlag
Erscheinungsjahr2018
Erscheinungsdatum25.10.2018
Seiten23204 Seiten
SpracheEnglisch
Dateigrösse32396 Kbytes
Artikel-Nr.4019815
Rubriken
Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Leseprobe
The Early Gothic Novel

Table of Contents


The shadow-haunted landscapes of "Ossian", the chaotic visions of William Blake, the grotesque witch-dances in Burns's "Tam o'Shanter", the sinister daemonism of Coleridge's "Christabel" and "Ancient Mariner", the ghostly charm of James Hogg's "Kilmeny", and the more restrained approaches to cosmic horror in "Lamia" and many of Keats's other poems, are typical British illustrations of the advent of the weird to formal literature. Our Teutonic cousins of the Continent were equally receptive to the rising flood, and Brüger's "Wild Huntsman" and the even more famous daemon-bridegroom ballad of "Lenore"-both imitated in English by Scott, whose respect for the supernatural was always great-are only a taste of the eerie wealth which German song had commenced to provide. Thomas Moore adapted from such sources the legend of the ghoulish statue-bride (later used by Prosper Mérimée in "The Venus of Ille", and traceable back to great antiquity) which echoes so shiveringly in his ballad of "The Ring"; whilst Goethe's deathless masterpiece Faust, crossing from mere balladry into the classic, cosmic tragedy of the ages, may be held as the ultimate height to which this German poetic impulse arose.

But it remained for a very sprightly and worldly Englishman-none other than Horace Walpole himself-to give the growing impulse definite shape and become the actual founder of the literary horror-story as a permanent form. Fond of mediaeval romances and mystery as a dilettante's diversion, and with a quaintly imitated Gothic castle as his abode at Strawberry Hill, Walpole in 1764 published The Castle of Otranto; a tale of the supernatural which, though thoroughly unconvincing and mediocre in itself, was destined to exert an almost unparalleled influence on the literature of the weird. First venturing it only as a "translation" by one "William Marshal, Gent." from the Italian of a mythical "Onuphrio Muralt", the author later acknowledged his connexion with the book and took pleasure in its wide and instantaneous popularity-a popularity which extended to many editions, early dramatisation, and wholesale imitation both in England and in Germany.

The story-tedious, artificial, and melodramatic-is further impaired by a brisk and prosaic style whose urbane sprightliness nowhere permits the creation of a truly weird atmosphere. It tells of Manfred, an unscrupulous and usurping prince determined to found a line, who after the mysterious sudden death of his only son Conrad on the latter's bridal morn, attempts to put away his wife Hippolita and wed the lady destined for the unfortunate youth-the lad, by the way, having been crushed by the preternatural fall of a gigantic helmet in the castle courtyard. Isabella, the widowed bride, flees from this design; and encounters in subterranean crypts beneath the castle a noble young preserver, Theodore, who seems to be a peasant yet strangely resembles the old lord Alfonso who ruled the domain before Manfred's time. Shortly thereafter supernatural phenomena assail the castle in divers ways; fragments of gigantic armour being discovered here and there, a portrait walking out of its frame, a thunderclap destroying the edifice, and a colossal armoured spectre of Alfonso rising out of the ruins to ascend through parting clouds to the bosom of St. Nicholas. Theodore, having wooed Manfred's daughter Matilda and lost her through death-for she is slain by her father by mistake-is discovered to be the son of Alfonso and rightful heir to the estate. He concludes the tale by wedding Isabella and preparing to live happily ever after, whilst Manfred-whose usurpation was the cause of his son's supernatural death and his own supernatural harassing-retires to a monastery for penitence; his saddened wife seeking asylum in a neighbouring convent.

Such is the tale; flat, stilted, and altogether devoid of the true cosmic horror which makes weird literature. Yet such was the thirst of the age for those touches of strangeness and spectral antiquity which it reflects, that it was seriously received by the soundest readers and raised in spite of its intrinsic ineptness to a pedestal of lofty importance in literary history. What it did above all else was to create a novel type of scene, puppet-characters, and incidents; which, handled to better advantage by writers more naturally adapted to weird creation, stimulated growth of an imitative Gothic school which in turn inspired the real weavers of cosmic terror-the line of actual artists beginning with Poe. This novel dramatic paraphernalia consisted first of all of the Gothic castle, with its awesome antiquity, vast distances and rambling, deserted, or ruined wings, damp corridors, unwholesome hidden catacombs, and galaxy of ghosts and appalling legends, as a nucleus of suspense and daemoniac fright. In addition, it included the tyrannical and malevolent nobleman as villain; the saintly, long-persecuted, and generally insipid heroine who undergoes the major terrors and serves as a point of view and focus for the reader's sympathies; the valorous and immaculate hero, always of high birth but often in humble disguise; the convention of high-sounding foreign names, mostly Italian, for the characters; and the infinite array of stage properties which includes strange lights, damp trap-doors, extinguished lamps, mouldy hidden manuscripts, creaking hinges, shaking arras, and the like. All this paraphernalia reappears with amusing sameness, yet sometimes with tremendous effect, throughout the history of the Gothic novel; and is by no means extinct even today, though subtler technique now forces it to assume a less naive and obvious form. An harmonious milieu for a new school had been found, and the writing world was not slow to grasp the opportunity.

German romance at once responded to the Walpole influence, and soon became a byword for the weird and ghastly. In England one of the first imitators was the celebrated Mrs. Barbauld, then Miss Aikin, who in 1773 published an unfinished fragment called "Sir Bertrand", in which the strings of genuine terror were truly touched with no clumsy hand. A nobleman on a dark and lonely moor, attracted by a tolling bell and distant light, enters a strange and ancient turreted castle whose doors open and close and whose bluish will-o'-the-wisps lead up mysterious staircases toward dead hands and animated black statues. A coffin with a dead lady, whom Sir Bertrand kisses, is finally reached; and upon the kiss the scene dissolves to give place to a splendid apartment where the lady, restored to life, holds a banquet in honour of her rescuer. Walpole admired this tale, though he accorded less respect to an even more prominent offspring of his Otranto-The Old English Baron, by Clara Reeve, published in 1777. Truly enough, this tale lacks the real vibration to the note of outer darkness and mystery which distinguishes Mrs. Barbauld's fragment; and though less crude than Walpole's novel, and more artistically economical of horror in its possession of only one spectral figure, it is nevertheless too definitely insipid for greatness. Here again we have the virtuous heir to the castle disguised as a peasant and restored to his heritage through the ghost of his father; and here again we have a case of wide popularity leading to many editions, dramatisation, and ultimate translation into French. Miss Reeve wrote another weird novel, unfortunately unpublished and lost.

The Gothic novel was now settled as a literary form, and instances multiply bewilderingly as the eighteenth century draws toward its close. The Recess, written in 1758 by Mrs. Sophia Lee, has the historic element, revolving round the twin daughters of Mary, Queen of Scots; and though devoid of the supernatural, employs the Walpole scenery and mechanism with great dexterity. Five years later, and all existing lamps are paled by the rising of a fresh luminary of wholly superior order-Mrs. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), whose famous novels made terror and suspense a fashion, and who set new and higher standards in the domain of macabre and fear-inspiring atmosphere despite a provoking custom of destroying her own phantoms at the last through laboured mechanical explanations. To the familiar Gothic trappings of her predecessors Mrs. Radcliffe added a genuine sense of the unearthly in scene and incident which closely approached genius; every touch of setting and action contributing artistically to the impression of illimitable frightfulness which she wished to convey. A few sinister details like a track of blood on castle stairs, a groan from a distant vault, or a weird song in a nocturnal forest can with her conjure up the most powerful images of imminent horror; surpassing by far the extravagant and toilsome elaboration of others. Nor are these images in themselves any the less potent because they are explained away before the end of the novel. Mrs. Radcliffe's visual imagination was very strong, and appears as much in her delightful landscape touches-always in broad, glamorously pictorial outline, and never in close detail-as in her weird phantasies. Her prime weaknesses, aside from the habit of prosaic disillusionment, are a tendency toward erroneous geography and history and a fatal predilection for bestrewing her novels with insipid little poems, attributed to one or another of her characters.

Mrs. Radcliffe wrote six novels, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1794), The Romance of the Forest (1791), The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), The Italian (1797), and Gaston de Blondeville, composed in 1802 but first published posthumously in 1826. Of these Udolpho is by far the most famous, and may be...
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Autor

Shelley, MaryHawthorne, NathanielBeckford, William ThomasLewis, Matthew GregoryRadcliffe, AnnAusten, JanePolidori, John WilliamBrontë, CharlotteBrontë, EmilyHubbell, WalterReynolds, George W. M.Shiel, M. P.Bierce, AmbroseChamisso, Adelbert vonMachen, ArthurHodgson, William HopeDoyle, Arthur ConanAllen, GrantStoker, BramGautier, ThéophileMarsh, RichardFanu, Joseph Sheridan LeLovecraft, H. P.Hardy, ThomasDickens, CharlesKipling, Rudyardde Maupassant, GuyGaskell, ElizabethTwain, MarkDefoe, DanielJerome, Jerome K.O'Brien, Fitz-JamesCrowe, CatherineWells, H. G.Erckmann, ÉmileChatrian, Alexandrede Alarçon, PedroEdwards, Amelia B.Irving, WashingtonFalkner, John MeadeStowe, Harriet BeecherFreeman, Mary E. WilkinsAlcott, Louisa M.Nesbit, EdithPoe, Edgar AllanMolesworth, Mary LouisaCrawford, Francis MarionBangs, John KendrickBuchan, JohnBaring-Gould, SabineMoffett, ClevelandTracy, LouisGogol, NikolaiRymer, James MalcolmPrest, Thomas PeckettJames, HenryMarryat, FrederickWilde, OscarStevenson, Robert LouisGilman, Charlotte PerkinsJacobs, W. W.(Saki), H. H. Munro (Author)Hauff, WilhelmBraddon, Mary ElizabethChambers, Robert W.Bulwer-Lytton, EdwardWalpole, HughDe Quincey, ThomasThackeray, William MakepeaceHoffmann, E. T. A.Howard, Robert E.Lindsay, DavidLowndes, Marie BellocBellamy, EdwardLondon, JackYounger, Pliny TheBlavatsky, HelenaJames, M. R.Hume, FergusMarryat, Florencede Adam, Villiers l'IsleArcher, WilliamHarvey, William F.Rickford, KatherineCram, Ralph AdamsKompert, LeopoldMatthews, BranderO'Sullivan, VincentCollins, WilkieButler, Ellis ParkerQuiller-Couch, A. T.Macleod, FionaHearn, LafcadioStead, William T.Bolton, GambierDavis, Andrew JacksonNizidaPrince, Walter F.Fernando, Chester BaileyBenson, E. F.Kip, LeonardStockton, Frank R.Croker, Bithia MaryPirkis, Catherine L.Andreyev, LeonidFrance, AnatoleGallienne, Richard LeMontgomery, Lucy MaudWeinbaum, Stanley G.Walpole, HoraceBealby, J. T.ÜbersetzungHenley, SamuelÜbersetzungHapgood, Isabel F.ÜbersetzungHogarth, C. J.Übersetzung