Melmoth the Wanderer (Penguin Classics)
by Charles Robert Maturin
from Penguin Classics
Part Faust, part Mephistopheles, Melmoth has made a satanic bargain for immortality. Now he wanders the earth, an outsider with an eerie, tortured existence, searching for someone who will take on his contract and release him to die a natural death.
With its erudition and wit, and its parody of arcane learned manuscripts, this Gothic masterpiece-first published in 1820-follows in the tradition of both the classics of its genre and the works of Cervantes, Swift, and Sterne. Some of its many admirers were Sir Walter Scott, Honoré de Balzac, Edgar Allan Poe, and Maturin's great nephew, Oscar Wilde. This edition includes a critical introduction, explanatory notes, and suggestions for further reading.
Uncle Silas (Penguin Classics)
by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
from Penguin Classics
In Uncle Silas, Sheridan Le Fanu's most celebrated novel, Maud Ruthyn, the young, naïve heroine, is plagued by Madame de la Rougierre from the moment the enigmatic older woman is hired as her governess. A liar, bully, and spy, when Madame leaves the house, she takes her dark secret with her. But when Maud is orphaned, she is sent to live with her Uncle Silas, her father's mysterious brother and a man with a scandalous-even murderous-past. And, once again, she encounters Madame, whose sinister role in Maud's destiny becomes all too clear.
With its subversion of reality and illusion, and its exploration of fear through the use of mystery and the supernatural, Uncle Silas shuns the conventions of traditional horror and delivers a chilling psychological thriller.
Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition
Modern Gothic: A Reader
Lefanu's Gothic: Politics, Culture, Narrative
by Victor Sage
from Palgrave Macmillan
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