Gothic and strange: twelve unsettling classics
These books are often grouped together, but they are frightening in quite different ways: a creature that can argue, a house that will not let go, a portrait that keeps a record, a ship's log that does not add up, a wallpaper pattern, and a theology that licenses murder.
The list
- Frankenstein — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1818. Short, structurally clever, and far more interested in abandonment than in electricity.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë, 1847. The most structurally ambitious of the Brontë novels, and the least sentimental.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Picture of Dorian Gray — Oscar Wilde, 1890. Aphorisms on one page and a genuinely disturbing moral structure on the next.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Dracula — Bram Stoker, 1897. The founding vampire novel, and a surprisingly clever piece of documentary storytelling.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Yellow Wallpaper — Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892. Twenty minutes long, and the most economical unreliable narrator in the language.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Time Machine — H. G. Wells, 1895. Short enough for one sitting, and the origin of most time-travel fiction that followed.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886. Short, controlled and much stranger than the phrase 'Jekyll and Hyde' now suggests.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner — James Hogg, 1824. A Scottish Gothic masterpiece about certainty, and the most unsettling novel in this list.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Italian — Ann Radcliffe, 1797. Radcliffe's best-plotted novel, and the one with the most interesting villain.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The House of the Seven Gables — Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851. Hawthorne's Salem novel: a haunted house, a family curse, and a sharp eye for genteel poverty.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Castle of Otranto — Horace Walpole, 1764. The first Gothic novel, and the source of a whole genre's furniture.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon - The Turn of the Screw — Henry James, 1898. The most perfectly ambiguous ghost story in English, and a masterclass in unreliable narration.
Read free at Project Gutenberg · print edition on Amazon
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