First published in 1878, The Haunted Hotel is among the later works of Wilkie Collins, famous for his 1868 novel The Moonstone, widely considered as the first modern English detective novel. The Haunted Hotel is notable for its atmosphere–a decaying palace in Venice–as well as intrigue among members of the aristocracy. “Wilkie Collins invented the […]
Category Archives: Gothic Mysteries
October
09
The Detective Stories of Edgar Allan Poe featuring C. Auguste Dupin
posted by sugarskullpress
“It is because I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s stories so much that I began to make suspense films.” ALFRED HITCHCOCK “Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?” ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE “Mr. Poe has that indescribable something that men have agreed to call genius.” JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL “Poe constantly and inevitably produced […]
October
05
Ghost Stories by Edith Wharton
posted by sugarskullpress
Ghost Stories features ten ghostly tales of the Gilded Age from one of America’s finest writers — Edith Wharton (1862-1937), author of The Age of Innocence, winner of the 1920 Pulitzer Prize. “Wharton’s graceful sentences create dramatic, populous tableaux and peel back layer after layer of artifice and pretense, of what we say and how […]
September
21
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
posted by sugarskullpress
The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till somebody happened to say that it was the only case he had met in which such […]
September
21
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
posted by sugarskullpress
“…Stevenson’s short novel, written in 1885, is one of the ancestors of the modern mystery story…not only a good ‘bogey story,’ as Stevenson exclaimed when awakening from a dream in which he had visualized it…It is also, and more importantly, a fable that lies nearer to poetry than to ordinary prose fiction, and therefore belongs […]
September
18
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
posted by sugarskullpress
“I busied myself to think of a story…one which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror — one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.” MARY SHELLEY (introduction to the 1831 edition) “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a […]
September
11
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
posted by sugarskullpress
“Wilde is one of the happy few who do not need the approval of the critic, nor even, sometimes, the approval of the reader for the pleasure he gives us is constant and irresistible.” JORGE LUIS BORGES “[Wilde] was a great artist…he wrote to please his own wild intellect.” G.K. CHESTERTON “Wilde was the greatest […]
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