Classic Horror Fiction

The Victorian-era writers featured in this collection are known for their power of invention and command of horror and the supernatural. Included are "A Watcher by the Dead" by Ambrose Bierce; "The Body Snatchers" by Robert Louis Stevenson; "The Adventure of the German Student" by Washington Irving; "Dickon the Devil" by J. Sheridan Le Fanu; "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe; and "The Open Watcher" by Saki.

The modern audience hasn't had a chance to truly appreciate the unknowing dread that readers would have felt when reading Bram Stoker's original 1897 manuscript. Most modern productions employ campiness or sound effects to try to bring back that gothic tension, but we've tried something different. By returning to Stoker's original storytelling structure - a series of letters and journal entries voiced by Jonathan Harker, Dr. Van Helsing, and other characters - with an all-star cast of narrators, we've sought to recapture its originally intended horror and power.

Narrator Dan Stevens ( Downton Abbey) presents an uncanny performance of Mary Shelley's timeless gothic novel, an epic battle between man and monster at its greatest literary pitch. In trying to create life, the young student Victor Frankenstein unleashes forces beyond his control, setting into motion a long and tragic chain of events that brings Victor to the very brink of madness. How he tries to destroy his creation, as it destroys everything Victor loves, is a powerful story of love, friendship, scientific hubris, and horror.

This is the disturbing tale of the dual personality of Dr. Jekyll, a physician. A generous and philanthropic man, he is preoccupied with the problems of good and evil and with the possibility of separating them into distinct personalities. He develops a drug that transforms him into the demonic Mr. Hyde, in whose person he exhausts all the latent evil in his nature.

In the secluded Dutch territory of Sleepy Hollow, nebbish schoolmaster Ichabod Crane competes with the town hero for the hand of Katrina Van Tassel, the 18-year-old daughter and sole child of a wealthy farmer. As Crane leaves a party at the Van Tassel's farm one autumn evening, he is pursued by the Headless Horseman, an apparition said to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper snuffed out by a stray cannonball.

In the slums of 18th-century France, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born with one sublime gift - an absolute sense of smell. As a boy, he lives to decipher the odors of Paris and apprentices himself to a prominent perfumer who teaches him the ancient art of mixing precious oils and herbs. But Grenouille's genius is such that he is not satisfied to stop there, and he becomes obsessed with capturing the smells of objects. Then one day, he catches a hint of a scent that will drive him on an ever-more-terrifying quest to create the "ultimate perfume" - the scent of a beautiful young virgin.

Passionné par les sciences occultes, Victor Frankenstein est persuadé qu'il peut donner la vie. Dans la solitude de son laboratoire, un soir d'orage, son rêve devient réalité... et tourne au cauchemar. Il vient de créer un être monstrueux. Victor fuit, épouvanté. Mais il est trop tard : la créature, rejetée de tous, prépare déjà sa vengeance.

London. A city drowning in fog. Amid that fog, a man with no name dies above a strange junkshop. Threads of mist and intrigue weave around a court case with no resolution, linking great country houses with the lowest slum in the city, mingling the high-born with a boy who sweeps the filthy streets, enshrouding devious plots and sudden murder, bringing together two extraordinary women – Lady Dedlock and Esther Summerson - who seem to have nothing whatsoever in common but who will find themselves inextricably linked.

Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Emmy winner Emma Thompson lends her immense talent and experienced voice to Henry James' Gothic ghost tale, The Turn of the Screw. When a governess is hired to care for two children at a British country estate, she begins to sense an otherworldly presence around the grounds. Are they really ghosts she's seeing? Or is something far more sinister at work?

New York City in 1978 is a dirty, dangerous place to live - and die. Joey Peacock knows this as well as anybody - he has spent the last forty years as an adolescent vampire, perfecting the routine he now enjoys: womanizing in punk clubs and discotheques, feeding by night, and sleeping by day with others of his kind in the macabre labyrinth under the city's sidewalks.

One last laugh for the summer as it winds down. One last prank just to scare a friend. Bringing a mannequin into a theater is just some harmless fun, right? Until it wakes up. Until is starts killing. Luckily, Sawyer has a plan. He'll be a hero. He'll save everyone to the best of his ability. He'll kill as many people as he needs to so he can save the day. That's the thing about heroes - sometimes you have to become a monster first.

This dark psychological fantasy is more than a moral tale. It is also a product of its time, drawing on contemporary theories of class, evolution and criminality, and the secret lives behind Victorian propriety, to create a unique form of urban Gothic.

Arthur Conan Doyle was the greatest genre writer Britain has ever produced. Throughout a long writing career, he drew on his own medical background, his travels, and his increasing interest in spiritualism and the occult to produce a spectacular array of Gothic tales. Many of Doyle's writings are recognized as the very greatest tales of terror. They range from hauntings in the polar wasteland to evil surgeons and malevolent jungle landscapes. This collection brings together over 30 of Conan Doyle's best Gothic tales

CONTENTS: A Suspicious Gift [Algernon Blackwood], Skeleton Lake: An Episode in Camp [Algernon Blackwood], The Wood of the Dead [Algernon Blackwood], A Baby Tramp [Ambrose Bierce], The Damned Thing [Ambrose Bierce], Dagon [H.P Lovecraft], The Horror of the Heights [Arthur Conan Doyle], The_Descendant [H.P Lovecraft], The Cats of Ulthar [H.P Lovecraft], The Evil Clergyman [H.P Lovecraft], He [H.P Lovecraft], The Book [H.P Lovecraft], In the Vault [H.P Lovecraft],Nyarlathotep [H.P Lovecraft], Death and the Woman [Gertrude Atherton], The Striding Place [Gertrude Atherton].

In Frankenstein, a classic tale of bio-engineering gone horribly wrong, Victor Frankenstein uses body parts of the dead to bring a creature to life. When Frankenstein abandons his experiment in horror, the Monster embarks on a quest that results in the ultimate revenge. In Dracula, a timeless gothic vampire romance, young solicitor Jonathan Harker must shield his fiancé, Mina, from the predations of the insatiable Count Dracula. Mysteriously drawn to the Count, Mina, however, struggles to break free from the psychic grip of the mysterious dark stranger from Transylvania.

Powers of Darkness is an incredible literary discovery. In 1900, Icelandic publisher and writer Valdimar Asmundsson set out to translate Bram Stoker's world-famous 1897 novel Dracula. Called Makt Myrkranna (literally, 'Powers of Darkness'), this Icelandic edition included an original preface written by Stoker himself. Makt Myrkranna was published in Iceland in 1901 but remained undiscovered outside of the country until 1986, when Dracula scholarship was astonished by the discovery of Stoker's preface to the book.

This was the most popular novel of Radcliffe's time; Radcliffe's portrayal of her heroine's inner life raised the Gothic romance to a new level. The atmosphere of fear and the gripping plot continue to thrill today. This is the story of the orphaned Emily St Aubert, who finds herself separated from the man she loves and confined within the Castle of Udolpho by her aunt's new husband Montoni. Here she must cope with an unwanted suitor, Montoni's threats, and the wild imaginings and terrors which threaten to overwhelm her.

There's something special about eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark. With her carefully plaited hair and her sweet cotton dresses, she's the very picture of old-fashioned innocence. But when their neighborhood suffers a series of terrible accidents, her mother begins to wonder: Why do bad things seem to happen when little Rhoda is around?

Four seekers have come to the ugly, abandoned old mansion: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of the psychic phenomenon called haunting; Theodora, his lovely and lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a lonely, homeless girl well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the adventurous future heir of Hill House.

At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.