Best of
Gothic

1996

The Raven


Edgar Allan Poe - 1996
    Doré's dreamlike, otherworldly style, tinged with melancholy, seems ideally matched to the bleak despair of Poe's celebrated work, among the most popular American poems ever written.This volume reprints all 26 of Doré's detailed, masterly engravings from a rare 19th-century edition of the poem. Relevant lines from the poem are printed on facing pages and the complete text is also included. Admirers of Doré will find ample evidence here of his characteristic ability to capture the mood and meaning of a work of literature in striking imagery; lovers of The Raven will delight in seeing its mournful musing on love and loss given dramatic pictorial form.

House of Echoes


Barbara Erskine - 1996
    Eager to begin a new life there with Luke, her husband, and Tom, her small son, she is also impatient to find out about her newly discovered family who lived there for generations.But not long after they move in, Tom wakes screaming at night. Joss hears echoing voices and senses an invisible presence, watching her from the shadows. Are they spirits from the past? Or is she imagining them? As she learns, with mounting horror, of Belheddon's tragic and dramatic history, her fear grows very real, for she realises that both her family and her own sanity are at the mercy of a violent and powerful energy which seems beyond anyone's control.

Dracula: Classics Retold


Mike Stocks - 1996
    Include informative notes on the authors and original texts.

American Gothic Tales


Joyce Carol OatesAmbrose Bierce - 1996
    She is able to see the unbroken link of the macabre that ties Edgar Allan Poe to Anne Rice and to recognize the dark psychological bonds between Henry James and Stephen King. This remarkable anthology of gothic fiction, spanning two centuries of American writing, gives us an intriguing and entertaining look at how the gothic imagination makes for great literature in the works of forty-six exceptional writers. In showing us the gothic vision—a world askew where mankind’s forbidden impulses are set free from the repressions of the psyche, and nature turns malevolent and lawless—Joyce Carol Oates includes Henry James’s “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” Herman Melville’s horrific tale of factory women, “The Tartarus of Maids,” and Edith Wharton’s “Afterward,” which are rarely collected and appear together here for the first time.Added to these stories of the past are new ones that explore the wounded worlds of Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Raymond Carver, and more than twenty other wonderful contemporary writers. This impressive collection reveals the astonishing scope of the gothic writer’s subject matter, style, and incomparable genius for manipulating our emotions and penetrating our dreams. With Joyce Carol Oates’s superb introduction, American Gothic Tales is destined to become the standard one-volume edition of the genre that American writers, if they didn’t create it outright, have brought to its chilling zenith.rom Wieland, or The transformation / Charles Brockden Brown --The legend of Sleepy Hollow / Washington Irving --The man of adamant / Nathaniel Hawthorne --Young Goodman Brown / Nathaniel Hawthorne --The Tartarus of maids / Herman Melville --The black cat / Edgar Allan Poe --The yellow wallpaper / Charlotte Perkins Gilman --The romance of certain old clothes / Henry James --The damned thing / Ambrose Bierce --Afterward / Edith Wharton --The striding place / Gertrude Atherton --Death in the woods / Sherwood Anderson --The outsider / H.P. Lovecraft --A rose for Emily / William Faulkner --The lonesome place / August Derleth --The door / E.B. White --The lovely house / Shirley Jackson --Allal / Paul Bowles --The reencounter / Isaac Bashevis Singer --In the icebound hothouse / William Goyen --The enormous radio / John Cheever --The veldt / Ray Bradbury --The Dachau shoe / W.S. Merwin --The approved / W.S. Merwin --Spiders I have known / W.S. Merwin --Postcards from the Maginot Line / W.S. Merwin --Johnny Panic and the Bible of dreams / Sylvia Plath --In bed one night / Robert Coover --Schrödinger's cat / Ursula K. Le Guin --The waterworks / E.L. Doctorow --Shattered like a glass goblin / Harlan Ellison --Human moments in World War III / Don DeLillo --The anatomy of desire / John L'Heureux --Little things / Raymond Carver --The temple / Joyce Carol Oates --Freniere (from Interview with the Vampires) / Anne Rice --A short guide to the city / Peter Straub --In the penny arcade / Steven Millhauser --The reach / Stephen King --Exchange value / Charles Johnson --Snow / John Crowley --The last feast of Harlequin / Thomas Ligotti --Time and again / Breece D'J Pancake--Replacements / Lisa Tuttle --Spirit seizures / Melissa Pritchard --Cat in glass / Nancy Etchemendy --The girl who loved animals / Bruce McAllister --Ursus Triad, later / Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg --(from Geek Love) The nuclear family: his talk, her teeth / Katherine Dunn --Subsoil / Nicholson Baker

The Shit of God


Diamanda Galás - 1996
    The first collection of the texts by one of the world's leading and most controversial performance artists

Japanese Gothic Tales


Kyōka Izumi - 1996
    Gothic Tales makes available for the first time a collection of stories by this highly influential writer, whose decadent romanticism led him to envision an idiosyncratic world--a fictive purgatory --precious and bizarre though always genuine despite its melodramatic formality.The four stories presented here are among Kyoka's best-known works. They are drawn from four stages of the author's development, from the conceptual novels of 1895 to the fragmented romanticism of his mature work. In the way of introduction, Inouye presents a clear analysis of Kyoka's problematic stature as a great gothic writer and emphasizes the importance of Kyoka's work to the present reevaluation of literary history in general and modern Japanese literature in particular. The extensive notes that follow the translation serve as an intelligent guide for the reader, supplying details about each of the stories and how they fit into the pattern of mythic development that allowed Kyoka to deal with his fears in a way that sustained his life and, as Mishima Yukio put it, pushed the Japanese language to its highest potential.

Melody


V.C. Andrews - 1996
    But surrounded by the unrestrained love of her father, she felt safe until the terrible accident in the mine did not take away her father. Not yet recovering after his father's death, Melody left West Virginia with his mother Heile after this dream to become a model or actress. But first they came to Cape Code to finally visit her father's family ..

Queen of Suspense: Nine Coaches Waiting/The Ivy Tree/The Moon-Spinners/Airs Above the Ground


Mary Stewart - 1996
    

The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle


Kelly Hurley - 1996
    In particular, Kelly Hurley explores a key scenario that haunts the genre: the loss of a unified and stable human identity, and the emergence of a chaotic and transformative abhuman identity in its place. Gothic is revealed as a highly productive and speculative genre, strongly indebted to nineteenth-century scientific, medical and social theories, including evolutionism, criminal anthropology and degeneration theory.

Gothic Art: Glorious Visions


Michael Camille - 1996
    In this radical reappraisal of Gothic art in Europe, the word "Gothic" describes not only an art style but a changing concept of space, time, and society - a new kind of perception, both visual and spiritual, in which light is of central importance. Camille shows us how the art of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was seen in its own time and explores the way vision itself was understood. In this age of glorious painting, magnificent, intricate architecture and sculpture, and jewellike manuscript illumination, art was an expression of religious passion and earthly power, of public and private wealth; of science and learning. The new vision led to an explosion of brilliant images but had its grim side, rarely noticed by art history: the distorted representation of "others" like Jews, heretics, and lepers; a new vision not only of the marvelous, but also of the grotesque.

Romanticism and the Gothic: Genre, Reception, and Canon Formation


Michael Gamer - 1996
    Michael Gamer analyzes how and why Romantic writers drew on Gothic conventions while, at the same time, denying their influence in order to claim critical respectability. He shows how the reception of Gothic literature played a fundamental role in the development of Romanticism as an ideology, tracing the politics of reading, writing and reception at the end of the eighteenth century.

Nightmare: The Birth Of Horror


Christopher Frayling - 1996
    The vampire started life as a sexual fantasy, and Bram Stoker's tale became a metaphor for dominance and dependence in sexual relationships. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, perhaps the most psychological of all horror stories, examines the beast in man and the dark side of human nature. And The Hound of the Baskervilles is a tale of conflict between rationalism and folklore, and the skills of Sherlock Holmes.

Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction


David Glover - 1996
    Paradoxically, David Glover suggests, this very success has obscured the historical conditions and authorial circumstances of the novel’s production. By way of a long overdue return to the novels, short stories, essays, journalism, and correspondence of Bram Stoker, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals reconstructs the cultural and political world that gave birth to Dracula. To bring Stoker’s life into productive relationship with his writing, Glover offers a reading that locates the author within the changing commercial contours of the late-Victorian public sphere and in which the methods of critical biography are displaced by those of cultural studies. Glover’s efforts reveal a writer who was more wide-ranging and politically engaged than his current reputation suggests. An Irish Protestant and nationalist, Stoker nonetheless drew his political inspiration from English liberalism at a time of impending crisis, and the tradition’s contradictions and uncertainties haunt his work. At the heart of Stoker’s writing Glover exposes a preoccupation with those sciences and pseudo-sciences—from physiognomy and phrenology to eugenics and sexology—that seemed to cast doubt on the liberal faith in progress. He argues that Dracula should be read as a text torn between the stances of the colonizer and the colonized, unable to accept or reject the racialized images of backwardness that dogged debates about Irish nationhood. As it tracks the phantasmatic form given to questions of character and individuality, race and production, sexuality and gender, across the body of Stoker’s writing, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals draws a fascinating portrait of an extraordinary transitional figure. Combining psychoanalysis and cultural theory with detailed historical research, this book will be of interest to scholars of Victorian and Irish fiction and to those concerned with cultural studies and popular culture.

Madeline: After the Fall of Usher


Marie Kiraly - 1996
    Years after writing The Fall of the House of Usher, Edgar Allan Poe meets the granddaughter of the real Madeline Usher -- and uncovers a secret as twisted as the cursed House itself.

The Jewel Seed


Joan Aiken - 1996
    But it's lost. No-one knows where. Only Nonnie holds the key. Can she unravel the mystery before her worst enemies, a group of Siberian witches, catch up with her?

The Literature of Terror: Vol. 2


David Punter - 1996
    It's an ambitious attempt to redefine the word gothic so that it encompasses most of fantastic fiction and film for the past 200 years under a unifying theme: a preoccupation with fear. This is, of course, an extremely broad definition, so don't be surprised if you find yourself taking the theoretical sections of the book with a grain of salt. Also, since the book was first written in the late 1970s, much of the discussion of language and symbol relies on rather outdated Marxist and Freudian theories. Punter apologizes for the latter in the preface to this (the second) edition, saying that rather than doing a massive revision, he decided to "leave it largely as an 'unrestored' period piece, with its own characteristic style, silhouette, and mood"--while adding additional material on the contemporary gothic. Those caveats aside, however, The Literature of Terror is mostly successful as a comprehensive study. And it's an enormously useful reference for anyone with a more than passing interest in horror literature. Plus it benefits from being the work of a single author: Punter is an extremely well-read scholar who perceives fascinating connections between a wide variety of books and films, and he explains his ideas lucidly enough that you can judge for yourself how far you agree with them. Some of the high points are Punter's overview of what the word gothic means in other fields (such as architecture); his summaries of the roles of graveyard poetry, the sentimental novel, and the theory of the sublime in the development of the gothic concept; and his inclusion (as gothic and even horror writers) of such notables as Isak Dinesen, William S. Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Thomas Hawkes, and Robert Coover. If that's not enough to tempt you, the footnotes and bibliography alone offer ample yet well-chosen pointers to authors whose entertaining fiction you may not have discovered yet. Best of all, The Literature of Terror is written in English--that is, not loaded down with annoying words such as transgressive and trope that mar so much of postmodern criticism. You can browse for information about specific authors or dip into it at your leisure without losing the thread. And for an academic work, it's darn fun to read. (Be sure to get both Volume 1 and Volume 2.) --Fiona Webster

Hex Files: The Goth Bible


Mick Mercer - 1996
    The "Hex Files" offers a five-continent survey of what's out there and how to plug into the Goth scene worldwide. 200+ illustrations.

The Periwinkle Brooch


Kate Frederick - 1996
    But the handsome Charles had sparked her desires and promised her a passion that would last forever. So when he became enraged at her for wearing his dead wife's brooch, Deborah thought his anger was momentary. But when the sparkling pin seemed to have a strange power over her, she grew determined to uncover its secret.

V. C. Andrews: A Critical Companion


E.D. Huntley - 1996
    Andrews. Andrews's ability to create adolescent characters who are caught uncomfortably between childhood and adulthood has won her millions of teenage readers. She focuses on the female adolescent experience and connects with her readers by creating characters who reflect adolescent struggles, confusion, and pain. Huntley shows that the power of Andrews's novels lies in her creation of an enthralling nightmare world, like a fairy tale gone berserk, in which the young heroine struggles with adolescent fears and frustrations in suddenly dangerous and bizarre domestic settings. Huntley locates the novels in the tradition of the female gothic, which Andrews refashioned into her own brand of gothicism: a blend of the gothic with horror fiction and the fairy tale.Huntley's study of Andrews's novels provides close textual analysis. The discussion of each novel is subdivided into sections on plot, character development and point of view, thematic development, generic conventions, and alternative critical perspectives such as feminist and psychological approaches, which offer additional insight and help to explain the attraction of adolescent readers to the Andrews novels. The novels and series covered in this work include Flowers in the Attic, the Dollanganger Chronicles (Petals on the Wind, If There Be Thorns, Seeds of Yesterday), Garden of Shadows, My Sweet Audrina, and the Casteel Story (Heaven, Dark Angel, Fallen Hearts). In addition, Huntley discusses the novels written under the name V. C. Andrews by Andrew Niederman after V. C. Andrews's death in 1986. This study will open up possibilities for discussion about Andrews's work--its popularity, strange durability, and its special appeal to young adult readers. A must for secondary school and public library collections.