Presenting The Essential Tales of Horror: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, and Dracula by Bram Stoker with an introduction by Nicholas Tamblyn and illustrations by Katherine Eglund. This collection is part of The Essential Series by Golding Books.
The early horror novel and the gothic novel thrived in the 19th Century; the...
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Presenting The Essential Tales of Horror: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, and Dracula by Bram Stoker with an introduction by Nicholas Tamblyn and illustrations by Katherine Eglund. This collection is part of The Essential Series by Golding Books.
The early horror novel and the gothic novel thrived in the 19th Century; the gothic horror novel became one of the most popular of all, as did the vampire novel and, reflecting great strides in technology, the science fiction novel (that had already had a monumental cautionary tale--with the claim to being the first--in that of Frankenstein and his monster).
Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) in many ways defined the "modern vampire," which has remained dominant in popular culture ever since. The British Empire was still a force to be reckoned with at the end of the 19th century, and numerous authors wrote novels of "invasion literature," like Dracula, that captured the fear of mysterious outsiders (which would be echoed in many books and films in the United States, soon to become the dominant power in the next century).
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Oscar Wilde's only novel, takes its greatest inspiration from the German legend of Faust, the scholar who exchanges his soul with the Devil for limitless knowledge and worldly pleasures.
A novella differing from Robert Louis Stevenson's other celebrated adventure novels, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) nonetheless echoes ideas of human personality and the good and evil in all people explored in Stevenson's earliest writings.
The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) may have been inspired by real events in Edgar Allan Poe's native Boston. Like Horace Walpole's novel The Castle of Otranto (1764)--which, in its second edition, was subtitled "A Gothic Story," leading to the term Gothic fiction--a large but disintegrating house or castle symbolizes the inevitable decline of the human body and all other life, a theme that would return again and again in Poe's work.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) ushered in the greatest fears of the misapplication of scientific discovery and the horrors that can result. The Greek myth of Prometheus describes a creator and benefactor of mankind who stole fire from Mount Olympus and the king of the gods Zeus, leading to an eternal punishment where Prometheus is fixed upon a rock of Caucasus and an eagle pecks out his liver and it regrows each day. Mary Shelley was inspired by Ovid's interpretation of this story, John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667)--Frankenstein's monster reads the poem in the story--and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), among others.
When we imagine horror, these are the characters and stories, classical and yet not too remote, that we first think of: Doctor Frankenstein and his monster, the characters of Poe's stories, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dorian Gray gazing into his picture, and the haunting persona and name of Count Dracula. We may finally come to fear sleep and others and memories and decay and the consequences of our actions, at least just a little, but in a world of worries and terrors, we know (and rather than deep down, we know it very close to the surface) that in life our thoughts and fears, sensing the nearness of dangers and greed, ought always to be that way.