Historical Horror Fiction

It is December 1888. Jack the Ripper has not killed for over a month and London is beginning to relax as Christmas approaches. When Katherine Kramer cuts herself on a strange book at a dinner party, she quickly falls ill. Her husband Richard is a professor of medicine, but even his efforts are futile as the mysterious illness blazes through her. As Katherine dies, she gives birth to something nightmarish. Something which should not exist. Something which spurs Richard to embark on a terrifying journey of discovery as he chases the answer to one question: who or what killed his wife?

From Britannica, The Horla, by Guy de Maupassant, is considered a masterly tale of the fantastic. The story was originally published as "Lettre d'un fou" ("Letter from a Madman") in 1885 and was revised, retitled "Le Horla," and published again in October 1886; the third and definitive version was published in May 1887. It is presented in the form of a diary and energetically details the hallucinatory obsessions of a madman.

Bristol, 1896. Used to scraping a living as the young assistant to an ageing con artist, Cecily Marsden's life is turned upside down when her master suddenly dies. Believing herself to blame, could young Cec somehow have powers she little understands? Meanwhile Eadie Carleton, a pioneering early film-maker, struggles for her talent to be taken seriously in a male-dominated world, and a brilliant young magician, George Perris, begins to see the potential in moving pictures.

In Teeth in the Hedgerow, giants, púcas, and fairies roam the forests and streets of Ireland, in search of the things they need. Blood, body parts, love and obsession from beyond the grave, or maybe just some good drugs and a good time? You won't get out without losing something dear to you, but be careful the thing you lose isn't your life!

London, 1873. Madeleine Brewster's marriage to Dr. Lucius Everley was meant to be the solution to her family's sullied reputation. After all, Lucius is a well-respected collector of natural curiosities. His 'Small Museum' of bones and specimens in jars is his pride and joy, although firmly kept under lock and key. His sister Grace's philanthropic work with fallen women is also highly laudable. However, Maddie soon finds herself unwelcome in what is meant to be her new home.

It started the night journalist Briar Thorne’s mother died in their rambling old mansion on Chicago’s South Side. The nightmares of a woman in white pleading to come home, music switched on in locked rooms, and the panicked fear of being swallowed by the dark…Bri has almost convinced herself that these stirrings of dread are simply manifestations of grief and not the beyond-world of ghostly impossibilities her mother believed in. And more tangible terrors still lurk outside the decaying Victorian greystone.

(1919) On his return from fighting the war in Europe, Eryk Laska finds Floodwood Station, Ohio, isn't the same quiet coal-mining town he left. Not only has an underhanded contender become a threat to his relationship with the love of his life, Eryk soon finds himself a prime suspect in one of the town’s growing number of grisly deaths.

You can’t kill someone who’s already dead. That’s what Lavinia keeps telling her jailer after—allegedly—killing her mistress, Simone Arceneau. But how could Simone be dead when she was taking callers just a few minutes before? And why was her house always so dark? Lavinia, a recently freed slave, met Simone, a recently undead vampire, by chance on a plantation in post–Civil War Georgia. With nothing remaining for either woman in the South, the two form a fast friendship and head north.

From out of the past comes a new tale of a hero who strikes like thunder! A madman's desperate quest for a fabled lost civilization! A brilliant scientist kidnapped! A menace unimaginable! These are fragments of a greater mystery that sets thunder Jim Wade on a collision course with The Horror of Hyperborea!

When brutal, mysterious deaths start plaguing the countryside and whispers of a beast in the mountains reach the quiet French hamlet of Mende, most people believe it’s a curse—God has sent a beast to punish them for their sins. But to sixteen-year-old Joséphine and her best friend, Clara, the beast isn’t a curse.

I still dream, every night, of Polneath on fire. Smoke unravelling from an upper window, and the terrace bathed in a hectic orange light.... Now I see that the decision I made at Polneath was the only decision of my life. Everything marred in that one dark minute.

In the soft glow of the Scottish summer of 1900, Lucy James and Sherlock Holmes find themselves in the heart of Inverness, in the home of Scotland's famed whiskey trade. Yet, their purpose is far from leisurely. They are on the hunt for the culprits behind a nefarious plot that threatens to shatter the very foundations of the British government.

Through heavens intervention everyone is brought forward to face evil of the past. George and Chris have no choice but to discuss conspiracies that occurred in the twentieth century. One of the saddest times in our world’s history was the twentieth century. George compares patriotism with political deviancy from what he knows had happened and why. George will talk about specific times of history that he was involved with.

Charles Boswell's short story "Monsters of Monarchy", Terror Tales, May 1940 features Roman emperor Caligula (12 BCE-24 CE), one of the most notorious Roman emperors. Known for his incestuous relationship with his sisters, and for his cruelty and madness, which culminated in Caligula naming his horse Roman consul and declaring himself a god. Caligula's brief reign and life turn into a complex and fascinating story of a boy-emperor thoroughly unprepared for the throne, who, in the early years of the Roman Empire, tried to make Rome an absolute monarchy but failed.

Abraham “Bram” Stoker was born in 1847 in Dublin as the third of seven children. Stoker was bedridden with an unknown illness until the age of seven, when he made a complete recovery. He even grew up to become a successful athlete. Stoker is best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. The novel Dracula begins when an English lawyer, Jonathan Harker, travels to Eastern Europe to meet Count Dracula, who is a client of his. When he arrives in Transylvania, he immediately notices that locals are shocked to learn where he is heading.

This annotated edition of the classic Gothic novel, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelly includes an historical introduction, an overview, study of the themes present in the book, and a list of famous quotes.

Gwythn wants nothing more than to marry Prince Alwen and become a princess in the court of King Blethen, the redeemer who rescued their lands from the tyrannical rule of the dragon shifters. But when she seems close to getting exactly what she wishes, new truths are revealed about the dragon shifters who were vanquished, truths about King Blethen and his sons, and truths that will make her question her loyalties...and her love.

When word spreads that three bodies have been found mutilated, Donald offers to help authorities seek the killer. He coaxes Harold into assisting and winds up leading the naive young man and the dutiful Alice into a labyrinth of deceit, madness, and murder. Lingering in the periphery is the shadowy figure of a local legend commonly known as the Slingerman, who some believe is behind the heinous crimes. Harold, who has heard stories of the creature since his cradle days, has his doubts — until the ominous figure begins manifesting itself to him.

In seventeenth-century Paris, nineteen-year-old Catherine Monvoisin is a well-heeled jeweler’s wife with a peculiar taste for the arcane. She lives a comfortable life, far removed from a childhood of abject destitution—until her kind spendthrift of a husband lands them both in debt. Hell-bent on avoiding a return to poverty, Catherine must rely on her prophetic visions and the grimoire gifted to her by a talented diviner to reinvent herself as a sorceress. With the help of the grifter Marie Bosse, Catherine divines fortunes in the Île de la Cité—home to sorcerers and scoundrels.

Behold the Many is the eerily beautiful story of three young sisters, Anah, Aki, and Leah. In 1913, they are sent away from their family for treatment for tuberculosis to an orphanage in Hawaii's Kalihi Valley. Of the three, two will die there, in spite of the nuns' best efforts to save them, and only Anah, the eldest, will grow to adulthood. But the ghosts of the dead children are afraid to leave the grounds of St. Joseph's, which is the only place they have known as home, and as Anah prepares to begin married life away from the orphanage, these ghost children grow angry.