My interest in ghosts is partly due to growing up in York, which is one of the most haunted cities in the UK. In that city, I think that pretty much every pub has its own ghost, and if you’re unlucky (or lucky) enough, you stand a good chance of spotting long-dead Roman soldiers, plague victims, or ghostly dogs as you walk the streets. This atmosphere has seeped into my fiction; I have written two novels of the supernatural and am currently working on a third. I’ve also made a study of the grim and gothic in fiction; my Ph.D. thesis was largely about vampires (especially Dracula) but also strayed into other monsters and uncanny stories over the past two centuries.
Oscar Wilde gave us a genuinely chilling gothic tale in The Picture of Dorian Gray, but in this short story, the supernatural is a source of fun.
The Otis family, pleasant, sensible, and up-to-date Americans, move into a haunted English manor and immediately antagonize Sir Simon de Canterville, the house’s resident spectre. Sir Simon has a theatrical flair for haunting, pulling out all the stops to terrify his victims into gibbering wrecks, but it’s all wasted on the Otis family, who are hilariously unbothered by the spookiness.
If you’re staying in a haunted house, I highly recommend channeling your inner Otis.
Despite warnings from Lord Canterville that their new home is haunted and that several family have fled form it in the middle of the night the Otis family chooses to go forward with their relocation. Almost immediately the Otis Family discovers that the stories are true and that their house is haunted by the ghost of Sir Simon. It is Sir Simon's intent not to share the house with anyone, but the Otis family is not like previous families that Sir Simon has scared off in the past. Narrated by the ghost himself, this Gothic ghost story takes the reader…
When I was twelve years old, my picture appeared in my hometown newspaper. I was holding a huge stack of books from the library, a week’s reading. All science fiction. I’ve read voraciously for the past seventy years—though much more widely as an adult. I’ve also had a life founding several small companies and writing twenty books. But I’ve continued to read science fiction, and, increasingly, dystopian novels. Why? Because, as a history buff, I think about the big trends that shape our lives. I see clearly that climate change, breakthroughs in technology, and unstable politics threaten our children’s future. I want to understand how these trends might play out—for better or for worse.
The news is full of stories about chilling developments in artificial intelligence.
And you don’t have to venture into the fantasy world of killer robots to be terrified. Already, “chatbots” are blurring the lines between human and machine intelligence.
It’s gotten to the point that you can’t trust what you see or read online—because it may have been created by some AI designed to cheat or scare you into doing something you really don’t want to do.
Ira Levin’s novel, published in 1970, shows us a world ruled by artificial intelligence. It’s dystopia in the truest sense—and it’s likely to frighten you, as it did me.
'Marvellously entertaining. A cross between Brave New World and Doctor Who' Look Magazine
Considered one of the great dystopian thrillers - alongside A Clockwork Orange and Brave New World- Ira Levin's terrifying glimpse into the future continues to fascinate readers even forty years after publication.
Set in a seemingly perfect global society, where uniformity is the defining feature, one man leads the resistance against UniComp - a central computer that has been programmed to keep every single human on the surface of the earth in check. All ethnic groups have been eugenically merged into a single race called 'The Family',…
I’ve always been fascinated by Gothic literature (and art, music, and movies), and I’m fortunate to have a job that allows me to talk and write about it—I teach at the College of Charleston (SC), where I just completed a course on American Gothic. I’m especially interested in nineteenth-century American writers, and I’ve written three books on Edgar Allan Poe, the most recent of which is The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City. For this list, I limited myself to Americans who, like Poe, wrote before and during the Civil War.
This early American novel starts off with an episode of human spontaneous combustion, followed by repeated episodes of characters hearing disembodied voices.
Brown’s novel uses these Gothic devices and a couple of real-life murder cases to explore religious and political issues that preoccupied Americans in the years after the Revolution. How do we know whether we’re really being guided by reason? What is the basis of authority?
Most editions of Wielandinclude Brown’s prequel Memoirs of Carwin, which complicates the story by placing one of the main characters in an Illuminati-like organization. American Gothic literature pretty much starts here.
In my career as a medievalist, I’ve been inspired by L. P. Hartley’s maxim that “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” At the same time, the people who live there are humans like ourselves. So, I’ve always tried to balance the alterity with the universality of the medieval past, asking big questions that bring together a wide range of sources and genres. In my forty years of teaching at Northwestern, I’ve enjoyed watching the impact of medieval texts change with each generation of students as they discover this strange yet immensely generative world.
Charles Williams is one of my guilty pleasures. The most esoteric of the famous Inklings, he wrote supernatural thrillers in which marvels take place in the midst of present-day London. This book, his last and, in my view, his best novel, is set near the end of WW II.
Two young women, killed instantly when a plane crashes onto them, find that they must work out their salvation—or its opposite—in a world where the living and the newly dead can still interact. The gestures of ordinary friendship and everyday cruelty turn out to have eternal stakes in this eerie, unforgettable novel, which I’ve reread more times than I can count.
First published in 1945, "All Hallows' Eve" is a fantasy novel by British writer Charles W. S. Williams. Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886 - 1945) was a British theologian, novelist, poet, playwright, and literary critic. He was also a member of the "The Inklings", a literary discussion group connected to the University of Oxford, England. They were exclusively literary enthusiasts who championed the merit of narrative in fiction and concentrated on writing fantasy. He was given an scholarship to University College London, but was forced to leave in 1904 because he couldn't afford the tuition fees. Other notable works by…
I love forests. There's a particular atmosphere, a sense of being close to nature. Yet there's a mystery, you can never see too far ahead. What's around the corner? A truly atmospheric book has the quality of a forest, leading us on but never revealing too much at once. Perhaps beyond the next tree, or page, is something that may not be of our universe.
Hodgson's sea-based stories, drawing on his experience as a sailor, have a plausibility that draws me in. The vast emptiness of the ocean is depicted vividly, creating a sense of isolation that adds to the terror of his work. Add to this some of the most bizarre creatures in literature and we have a bleak, enchanting atmosphere. I find the sense of brooding horror really puts me in the scene.
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My mother got cancer when I was seven and died when I was in college. So, I began to consider death and the afterlife from a very young age. I don’t know if ghosts are real, but I know that people are haunted. I explore this idea—that haunted houses are really settings for haunted humans—as well as the ambiguity between ghosts and mental descents in my own teaching and writing. I love haunted house novels because they’re wonderful vehicles for this sort of exploration and because they’re so much fun to read! I hope you enjoy these books as much as I do!
I have read this book more times than I have read any other book, and on my seventh read, I think I finally figured it out. I love a book that keeps you guessing, that keeps you wondering what’s real and what’s an illusion, and in this short novel, Henry James achieves just that. Are the ghosts real? Is the governess going insane?
James makes both possibilities equally likely—and equally frightening. My favorite ghost stories and horror novels are those that are ”about” something beyond the surface-level plot, and James creates a subtle queer sub-theme that is another reason why I keep reading this book again and again…
'A most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale' Oscar Wilde
The Turn of the Screw, James's great masterpiece of haunting atmosphere and unbearable tension, tells of a young governess sent to a country house to take charge of two orphans, Miles and Flora. Unsettled by a dark foreboding of menace within the house, she soon comes to believe that something, or someone, malevolent is stalking the children in her care. Is the threat to her young charges really a malign and ghostly presence, or a manifestation of something else entirely?
Edited and with an Introduction and Notes by David Bromwich Series…
I've been on a horror jag foe the past years or two and Adam is the British Steven King IMO. All of his horror books are recommended. Supernatural horror, not so much gory (most of the time) as creepy and eerie. You'll never feel the same about dolls and puppets after you've read this one.
House of Small Shadows is the disturbing novel about a modern phobia - the fear of dolls and puppets - from award-winning horror author Adam Nevill.
The Red House: home to the damaged genius of the late M. H. Mason, master taxidermist and puppeteer, where he lived and created some of his most disturbing works. The building and its treasure trove of antiques is long forgotten, but the time has come for his creations to rise from the darkness.
Catherine Howard can't believe her luck when she's invited to value the contents of the house. When she first sees the…
I started my professional writing career in 1987 having founded the small press writers’ magazine, Quartos, which ran for nine years until its merger with Acclaim in 1996 to become The New Writer, as well as authoring several creative writing how-to books – including Horror Upon Horror. In addition to acting as judge for national writing competitions, I've also tutored at writers’ workshops including The Annual Writers’ Conference (Winchester College), The Summer School (University of Wales), Horncastle College (Lincolnshire), and the Cheltenham Literature Festival. Having been a staunch supporter of the Gothic Society and a regular contributor to its quarterly magazine, Udolpho, I have also created the series of The Vampyre’s Tale novels.
As contemporary Gothic author and artist Franklin Bishop observe, John Polidori ‘was responsible for introducing into English fiction the enduring image of the vampyre in the guise of a suave, cynical, and murderous English Lord. With the presentation of Lord Ruthven [Byron] as a vampyre, Polidori created a personification of evil that countless authors have since imitated in attempting to satisfy the enormous public interest in this genre of literature. The literary-metamorphosed vampire that emerged from the Villa Diadoti ‘ghost story’ contest quickly developed a life force of its own – which was not surprising since it was the collective brainchild of Byron and his physician John Polidori – and created a minor literary scandal when it was published in 1818. The Vampyre was based on Lord Byron’s unfinished story "Fragment of a Novel," but it is arguably the most influential vampire work of the early 19th century.
I’ve loved reading alternative visions of Britain since I read a Strontium Dog saga in ‘2000AD’ as a boy. What was science fiction then has become closer to reality now. The idea of one event, such as a meteor shower in Triffids or a virus in ‘Grass,’ causing havoc worldwide is gripping. I prefer the British stories because they are closer to home. Many of these were written close to the Second World War, and their authors describe deprivation in unflinching detail. Recent political events have turned my mind to how human actions can cause dystopian futures, as in Orwell’s 1984.
Like H.G. Wells, Wyndham is excellent at depicting normal people who are dealing with an unusual event in normal locations. This creates a level of reality that makes the circumstances more horrific. I could imagine myself in those places, with those people.
The Triffids have never translated well to the screen because the plants look awkward. This isn’t the case in the book. This is my favorite of all the Wyndham books because of their journeys and their descriptions of the landscape around them.
When Bill Masen wakes up in his hospital bed, he has reason to be grateful for the bandages that covered his eyes the night before. For he finds a population rendered blind and helpless by the spectacular meteor shower that filled the night sky, the evening before. But his relief is short-lived as he realises that a newly-blinded population is now at the mercy of the Triffids.
Once, the Triffids were farmed for their oil, their uncanny ability to move and their carnivorous habits well controlled by their human keepers. But now, with humans so vulnerable, they are a potent…
My passion for small islands began as a child. I spent my summer holidays on the Isles of Scilly, where everyone knew each other, and the sea wiped the landscape clean, leaving it pristine each morning. Since then, I’ve visited dozens of islands, keen to understand the islanders’ survivalist mindset. I worked as an English teacher before becoming a writer. It allowed me to share my love of storytelling, but the tales that linger with me still take place on small islands where the consequences of our actions are never forgotten. I hope you enjoy exploring the ones on my list as much as I did!
I loved this book because it was so gripping. It made me long to be a writer. Although it was written over a hundred years ago, the dark story spoke directly to me.
I read it at the darkest time in my life. I was fourteen, and my alcoholic father had become a terrifying force in our home, just like Dr. Moreau, who rules his island with vicious power. I had never dreamed that a crazed leader could break an entire population, but the idea seems shockingly prescient now.
The book made me realize that I, too, could escape from the trap around me, just like the book’s hero, and learn to use my imagination to tell stories.
