Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book
10 best books like Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book (M.R. James): The Willows, Taras Bulba, The Outsider, The Statement of Randolph Carter, Dagon, Berenice, The Room in the Tower (PENG), The Body Snatcher, The Damned Thing, The Old Nurse's Story
| Author | Algernon Blackwood |
| ISBN | 1587156520 |
Two friends are midway on a canoe trip down the Danube River. Throughout the story Blackwood personifies the surrounding environment—river, sun, wind—and imbues them with a powerful and ultimately threatening character. Most ominous are the masses of dense, desultory, menacing willows,...
| Author | Nikolai Gogol |
| ISBN | 1406946168 |
Тарас Бульба = Taras Bulba, Nikolai Gogol
Taras Bulba (Tarás Búl'ba) is a romanticized historical novella by Nikolai Gogol. It describes the life of an old Zaporozhian Cossack, Taras Bulba, and his two sons, Andriy and Ostap. The sons study at the Kiev Academy and then return home,...
"The Outsider" is a short story by American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written between March and August 1921, it was first published in Weird Tales, April 1926. In this work, a mysterious man who has been living alone in a castle for as long as he can remember decides to break free in search of human contact....
The Statement of Randolph Carter
This early story—written in 1919, published in the amateur journal The Vagrant in 1920—is a simple but thoroughly effective tale of terror, based on one of Lovecraft’s dreams. Technically it could be considered part of Lovecraft’s Dunsanian Dream Cycle, since its hero Randolph Carter...
"Dagon" is the second story of the writer H.P.Lovecraft, written in 1917 and published ,for the first time, in 1919. The work takes its title from the mythological God Dagon, and tells a disturbing story, happened years before to a man with the obsession of suicide. Before throwing himself from the window...
| Author | Edgar Allan Poe |
| ISBN | 1594561699 |
Since there are a few dozen reviews already posted here, in the spirit of freshness I will compare Poe’s tale with a few other tales, each of these other tales picking up on a Berenice theme.
OBSESSION
In The Gaze by Jean Richepin, the narrator peers through the window of a...
The Room in the Tower (PENG)
E.F. Benson (1867-1940) fue, junto con M.R. James, uno de los maestros victorianos de la «ghost story», un territorio del terror cuya exploración inició el gran escritor irlandés Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Benson y James pertenecían a la misma sociedad literaria de Cambridge, la Chitchat Society,...
| Author | Robert Louis Stevenson |
| ISBN | 1860920012 |
”To bodies that had been laid in earth, in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there came that hasty, lamplit, terror-haunted resurrection of the spade and mattock.”
A group of friends have a habit of getting together in a hotel tavern to drink and tell tall tales,...
This engrossing tale presents as its central theme the ultimately unknowable – and untameable – essence of nature and the natural world. Told from several different perspectives, the story focuses on a freak fatal accident that is written off as a wild animal attack. But does that description...
| Author | Elizabeth Gaskell |
| ISBN | 0141397373 |
This is exactly why I bought this collection: to find authors I may not have normally come across. I love Gaskell’s style of writing, and I will most certainly be reading more of her work in the future. These two stories are everything I adore in Victorian literature; they are gothic and fear evoking,...
| Author | Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| ISBN | 5552044940 |
It has been a very, very long time since I read Nathaniel Hawthorne and that was "The Scarlet Letter" in high school. I have many on his on my "to read" list and hopefully will read one of his novels this year but after listening to an OTR (Old Time radio) show last week and hearing again their version of " Ethan...
The language of this short story is a paradigmatic example of early modernism, more concretely of a genre discourse as a branch of early modernism.
The genre is of course a gothic story, precisely a ghost story.
The theme of a haunting house is an essential topos in the gothic fiction world. A...
| Author | Charlotte Perkins Gilman |
| ISBN | 0312132921 |
This edition of The Yellow Wallpaper features historical materials which include nineteenth-century advice manuals for young women and mothers; medical texts discussing the nature of women's sexuality; social reform literature concerning women's rights, the working classes, and immigration;...
The Death of Halpin Frayser
| Author | Ambrose Bierce |
| ISBN | 1494413523 |
What an intriguing and well composed tale. Starting with a man in a forrest literally facing some threat in his dream. There is blood all around him. The story of his previous life is told, in a flashback chapter. He had a strange relationsship with his mother, we come to know. But what actually caused his...
A quite well written and conceived short story that is interesting today because it is a western werewolf story.
The Wild West meets a werewolf.
It's modernistic in its structure based upon an autodiegetic narrator and in that way it totally changes the frame of a folk tale, better said it uses...
| Author | Mary E. Wilkins Freeman |
| ISBN | 5552051785 |
Classic horror. There's a haunted house in town. Since it was abandoned, fifty years ago, only one person has dared to try to live there... and she promptly died. Rumors abound about the curse on the place... but only one elderly town resident remembers the woman who originally lived there, Luella Miller,...
| Author | J. Sheridan Le Fanu |
Joseph Sheridan le Fanu was the leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century, and he is now seen as central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era.
His work is credited with turning the Gothic's focus from the external sources of horror to the inward effects of terror, thus...
