Gothic Short Stories | David Blair (ed.)
"It was one of those nights when the moon gives a faint glimmering of light through the thick black clouds of a lowering sky."
Well, happy Hallo'ween! For this special occasion I have decided to be somewhat brave and read a book that has been sitting on my shelf for quite a while. I bought this when I was still in college, working on my Wuthering Heights diploma paper and fancying myself a lover of Gothic literature. Well, I wrote my paper, graduated and still had not touched this. I was a wuss. And Emily wasn't entirely Gothic, either so....
Alas, I have reached into the depths of my being, mustered all the courage I had and finally got to reading this. It was time. And it was also the most appropriate book I had for this time of year. Now, this is not horror that I know many prefer as their spooky reads for the season. As mentioned, I do not have the guts to read scary. Or watch, for that matter, which is why it's so hard to find movies for autumn. But I digress. I found this to be good reading for some spook but not outright terror that causes feverish nightmares.
"The realities of the world affected me as visions, and as visions only, while the wild ideas of the land of dreams became, in turn - not the material of my everyday existence - but in every deed that existence utterly and solely in itself."
But first, let us lay a foundation and establish some facts about these stories. Gothic literature was a sort of response to Victorian morals, originating in the 18th century. It deals with folklore, with mythic and supernatural, with emotional states and suspense. It was supposed to be a sort of pleasure in getting into dangerous situations, doing forbidden things vicariously through the protagonist. A majority of the stories are set at night, usually in a castle - crumbling and abandoned, with labyrinthine halls and haunted chambers - the atmosphere sets the tone so the reader knows to expect one uncomfortable surprise after another. Ghosts can be found in abundance, along with vampires, demons and other such creatures that inspired terror in the readers at the time. (And are still the inspiration for many a horror movie.) Madness is another such feature, with afflicted persons gleefully committing crimes of all sorts, with no trace of regret.
The stories contained within this particular collection are:
- Sir Bertrand: A Fragment by Anna Letitia Aikin - riding a horse through a dark night, happens upon a seemingly abandoned castle
- Captive of the Banditti by Nathan Drake & An Anonymous Hand - riding through the night, happens upon bandits and is almost thrown off a cliff
- Extracts from Gosschen's Diary: No. 1 by Anonymous - the night before the execution, a madman confesses to a priest about killing his lover
- The Parricide's Tale by Charles Robert Maturin - a hateful madman in a monastery spurns two young lovers and traps them in a cell to die
- The Spectre Bride by Anonymous - a stranger comes to a castle and seduces the only daughter, she runs off with him and he turns out to be a demon
- The Tapestried Chamber by Sir Walter Scott - a general comes to visit a boyhood friend after the war but has a terrible night's sleep with a spectral visitor
- Berenice by Edgar Allan Poe - madness features here as an obsessive compulsion
- A Madman's Manuscript by Charles Dickens - a madman enjoys deceiving people, making them think he is sane, features a lot of maniacal laughter and malice
- Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter by J. S. Le Fanu - a painter's love is forcibly married to a rich old man who turns out not to be quite human
- Ethan Brand by Nathaniel Hawthorne - on a dark night, a man comes back from his search for Unpardonable Sin, laughing maniacally
- The Old Nurse's Story by Elizabeth Gaskell - a ghost story about being haunted by youthful sins, told by the old nurse
- The Body Snatcher by Robert Louis Stevenston - anatomists exhume bodies for their laboratory work
- The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman - a mentally ill woman fixates on the ugly wallpaper in a rental house, imagining people behind it
- The Death of Halpin Frayser by Ambrose Bierce - a man asleep in the wood is haunted by apparitions, a murderer is being hunted
- Canon Alberic's Scrapbook by M. R. James - an Englishman comes to a French church and buys a book that leads to a demonic encounter
- No. 252 Rue M. le Prince by Ralph Adams Cram - the story of a notorious haunted house in Paris
- The Lame Priest by S. Carleton - a tale of a hermit who befriends a lame priest that turns out to be more than human
- Luella Miller by Mary Wilkins Freeman - a small town in New England, a woman sucks the life out of everyone that cares for her
- The Bird in the Garden by Richard Middleton - a child wanders through a garden, waiting on a special bird, but then he wakes up
- The Room in the Tower by E. F. Benson - a young man has a recurring dream about a woman, Julia Stone, dying
"The night was wild and stormy, and the wind howled in a fearful manner."
The only story I have heard of, and read, before is The Yellow Wallpaper, which I've analyzed as part of an assignment in college. Of course, I've read Poe and Hawthorne's work before - but those were the well known The Raven and The Scarlet Letter. Dickens was The Great Expectations (and later, A Christmas Carol) and Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. I was excited to get to this bunch too, especially since so many authors were unknown to me - and I, being a English Literature graduate, just had to expand my knowledge of old writers.
Now, to be perfectly honest, I did not enjoy all the stories. It is completely natural. There are so many writers and this is a very old-fashioned style, so the language and the writing sometimes leave a lot to be desired. There is barely any dialogue, and when a character is speaking is it usually in long paragraphs as they are telling the main story to someone, or recounting a frightful event. So be ready for that. What I did love was the atmosphere, the descriptions of dark nights and strange noises, situations that would make me lose my mind if I ever found myself in them. So, though sometimes a bit tedious, there is something to be gleaned from these stories. If nothing else - you'll have read some Gothic classics, and learned a bit about the origins of horror. That's something as well.
0 comments