Published the same year as Dracula, The Beetle was originally more popular with readers. Recommended edition: Dracula (Oxford World’s Classics) by Stoker, Bram, Luckhurst, Roger New Edition. Told from a variety of character perspectives and utilising various modes of recording (including logs, diaries, letters, and even phonograph recordings), Dracula is a classic Gothic horror novel whose story has been transformed in the popular imagination through various cinema retellings: the titular vampire isn’t dispatched with a stake through the heart in Stoker’s novel, but you’ll have to read it to find out how (or whether) he does meet his end. Īlthough it wasn’t the first vampire novel – there had been a number of vampire novels published earlier in the nineteenth century – Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, has come to define the genre. Recommended edition: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales (Oxford World’s Classics) by Stevenson, Robert Louis published by Oxford University Press, USA (2008). The result is a mixture of Gothic horror and detective fiction with one of the most famous twists in all of fiction Stevenson’s novella would go on to influence a raft of later writers, such as the less celebrated master of the Weird, Arthur Machen. He then rewrote the book over several weeks. Stevenson supposedly wrote the first draft of this classic 1886 novella in just three days, but burnt the original version after his wife criticised it. Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Recommended edition: Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text (Oxford World’s Classics) by Shelley, Mary (2009) Paperback. The novel, which tells of a student creating a man out of old body parts – and young Victor Frankenstein’s subsequent abandonment of the creature he has made – has been interpreted in a diverse number of ways, but might best be viewed as a cautionary tale about the need for personal responsibility or ‘good parenthood’. Īlso sometimes referred to as the first ever science fiction novel, Frankenstein was written by Mary Shelley when she was still a teenager, following a ghost-story competition at Lord Byron’s villa in Lake Geneva in 1816. Recommended edition: The Monk (Oxford World’s Classics). The novel received mixed reviews (from, among others, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who both loved and hated it), but it became a defining work of Gothic fiction. Set in eighteenth-century Madrid, the novel focuses on the scandalous activities of a monk, Ambrosio, who gives in to sexual temptation and ends up getting involved in a whole host of other sinful crimes, including rape, murder, and black magic. Written in around ten weeks while Lewis was still a teenager, The Monk was a huge success upon its publication in 1796, and earned its author the sobriquet ‘Monk’ Lewis. Recommended edition: A Sicilian Romance (Oxford World’s Classics). Unlike Udolpho, which suffers from dull moments, A Sicilian Romance packs all of the crucial ingredients of early Gothic – the castle, the crypt, the family secret, the supposed supernatural sightings – into a short, readable novel. Although The Mysteries of Udolpho is a more famous Ann Radcliff novel, we’d recommend this shorter 1790 novel as the perfect ‘gateway drug’ to Radcliffe’s brand of Gothic horror.
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