Classic Gothic Literature

The beautiful young Dorian Gray has his portrait painted by society artist Basil Hallward. Admired by all, the dazzling, wealthy, handsome young man has everything anyone could wish for, or so it appears. Oscar Wilde's novel is a masterly study of moral corruption, a tour-de-force of suspense and surprise.

For more than 50 years, William Gaddis collected notes for a book about the mechanization of the arts, told by way of a social history of the player piano in America. In the years before his death in 1998, he distilled the whole mass into a fiction, a dramatic monologue by an elderly man with a terminal illness. Continuing Gaddis's career - long reflection on those aspects of corporate technological culture that are uniquely destructive of the arts - Agape Agape is a stunning achievement from one of the indisputable masters of postwar American fiction.

"With the roar of thunder and the speed of a galloping horse comes the tide to Mont St. Michel", goes the old nursery song. So when the aged patriarch of the du Rocher family falls victim to the perilous tide, even the old man's family accepts the verdict of accidental drowning. But too quickly, this "accident" is followed by a bizarre discovery in the ancient du Rocher chateau: a human skeleton, wrapped in butcher paper, beneath the old stone flooring. Professor Gideon Oliver, lecturing on forensic anthropology at nearby St. Malo, is asked to examine the bones.

Strangling vines and meat-hungry flora fill this unruly garden of strange stories, selected for their significance as the seeds of the villainous (or perhaps just misunderstood) 'killer plant' in fiction, film and video games. Step within to marvel at Charlotte Perkins Gilman's giant wisteria and H.G. Wells' hungry orchid; hear the calls of the ethereal women of the wood and the frightful drone of the moaning lily; and do tread carefully around E. Nesbit's wandering creepers. Every strain of vegetable threat can be found within this new collection.

"Les Hauts de Hurlevent," le seul roman d'Emily Brontë, est un chef-d'œuvre intemporel de la littérature anglaise. Publié pour la première fois en 1847 sous le pseudonyme d'Ellis Bell, ce roman gothique plonge les lecteurs dans l'atmosphère sombre et tumultueuse des landes du Yorkshire.

In a small Western Queensland town, a reserved young woman receives a note from one of her vanished brothers - a note that makes question her memories of their disappearance and her father’s departure. A beguiling story that proves that Gothic delights and uncanny family horror can live - and even thrive - under a burning sun, Flyaway introduces listeners to Bettina Scott, whose search for the truth throws her into tales of eerie dogs, vanished schools, cursed monsters, and enchanted bottles.

From the number one best-selling author of The American Boy and The Ashes of London comes a collection of three Gothic novellas - Broken Voices, The Leper House and The Scratch - perfect for fans of The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley.

Visions have always been...my pasture. I almost think there is no wisdom comparable to that of exchanging the realities of life for dreams. Old castles, old pictures, old histories take one back into centuries that cannot disappoint. I waked one morning from a dream of which all I could recover was that I had thought myself in an ancient castle and that on the uppermost banister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate.

In 1897, at the age of 50, Bram Stoker was touring manager to the actor Henry Irving and was enjoying a modest success as a journalist and writer. Publication in that year of Dracula was to bring him international and lasting fame.

While on routine patrol in the tinder-dry Topanga Canyon, environmental scientist Rafael Salazar expects to find animal poachers, not a dilapidated antique steamer trunk. Inside the peculiar case, he discovers a journal, written by the renowned Robert Louis Stevenson, which divulges ominous particulars about his creation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It also promises to reveal a terrible secret - the identity of Jack the Ripper.

Notre-Dame de París cuenta la historia de la gitana Esmeralda, quien en compañía de su cabra Djali toca la pandereta y baila en las calles de París para subsistir, hasta que se la acusa de haber asesinado al capitán Phoebus, su amado, y se la condena a la horca. Sin embargo, el jorobado Quasimodo, campanero de Notre-Dame, quien tras su deformidad esconde un corazón sensible y sediento de amor, luchará para salvar a la gitana. Recreación del mito de la bella y la bestia y uno de los monumentos de la literatura francesa, Notre-Dame de París es una historia verdaderamente inmortal.

A gifted, idolized singer returns to his poor hometown and a life and family he is so far removed from he now holds them in contempt. The Gospel Singer reveals the absurdity of blind religious faith and idol worship and the hypocrisy that results with the offering of money or sex. Crews grapples with race, gender, religion, and place and steps back to divulge the secrets of his characters - including a dead girl awaiting the gospel singer’s melodious eulogy, his dysfunctional family, a murderer, the zealous town residents, and a traveling freak show.

This 19th century French thriller tells of the mysterious Erik, grotesque and elusive "phantom," who hides himself from the world in the labyrinthine bowels of the Paris Opera and entices with his angelic voice the beautiful opera singer Christine. Her abduction prompts a dramatic search not only for her, but also for the truth about her strange captor.

Heathcliff was to serve as the name for the ragged orphan whom Mr. Earnshaw found abandoned in the streets of Liverpool and took home to live with his own children, Cathy and Hindley, at Wuthering Heights. The stormy life of the mysterious Heathcliff, his love for Cathy and his relationships with the people who lived at Wuthering Heights and at nearby Thrushcross Grange make up Emily Bronte's classic novel.

A dark, many-gabled mansion in a small New England village—haunted by fraudulent dealings, accusations of witchcraft, and sudden death—houses the distinguished Pyncheon family. They are plagued by a centuries-old curse that casts the shadow of ancestral sin on its last four members. The arrival of Phoebe Pyncheon from the country breathes fresh air and sunshine into their musty, decaying home, but will her arrival come too late to rescue the family from a gloomy future?

Durante un viaje en Alta Mar, el capitán Walton le escriba cartas a su hermana: en ellas le cuenta sus aventuras, y sobre todo el misterioso encuentro con el doctor Víctor Frankenstein. Escrita por la inglesa Mary Shelley y publicada en 1818, la tenebrosa historia del científico que juega a ser Dios, singnificó un antes y un después en la llamada tradición gótica. La famosa novela explora temas como la moral, la creación y la destrucción de la vida, considerándose el primer texto del género de ciencia ficción.

For a century Bram Stoker's Dracula has reigned supreme as the undisputed masterpiece of horror writing. We have all grown up under the shadow of the elegant Count, at once an attractive, brutal, and erotic creature of the night. A skilled and imaginative cast, including Brian Cox as Van Helsing and Heathcote Williams as Dracula, brings this classic horror story to life!

Satan’s final judgement on Victoria sums up a shocking novel, set in Venice at the end of the 15th century, that tracks the path of its heroine from abused victim to fully fledged criminal. Her conscious embodiment of vice seems to know no limits. Depicting unfettered desire and gratuitous cruelty, and challenging taboos of race and class, this tale of lust, betrayal, and multiple murder has Dacre moving beyond the limits of contemporaneous gothic heroes into a truly hellish zone of her own.

In a forgotten corner of western Kentucky lies a haunted forest referred to locally as "The Deadening", where vampire cults roam wild and time is immaterial. Our protagonist and his accomplice - the one and only Carver Canute - set out down the Old Spur Line in search of the legendary Kudzu House, where an old couple is purported to have been swallowed whole by a hungry vine.

An old mansion in Salem, moss-covered and gabled, broods over the destiny of a distinguished but troubled New England Family, the Pynchons. A haunting, centuries-old curse, a forceful probing of national and personal guilt, a romance between the young heroine and an attractive stranger all intertwine in this classic work by one of America's greatest novelists.