This book is the earliest and most influential of the Gothic novels. First published pseudonymously in 1764, The Castle of Otranto purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. In it Walpole attempted, as he declared in the Preface to the second edition, "to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern." He gives us a series of catastrophes, ghostly interventions, revelations of identity, and exciting...

The Little Stranger follows the strange adventures of Dr. Faraday, the son of a maid who has built a life of quiet respectability as a country doctor. One dusty postwar summer in his home of rural Warwickshire, he is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for more than two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in declineits masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable...

Gothic fiction by more than 40 known and unknown writers. They range from William Sansom's A Woman Seldom Found, on an encounter in Rome between a man and a woman, to Paul Bowle's Allal, on an Arab boy who switches bodies with a snake

This volume, covering entries from "Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu" to "Oscar Wilde," includes a primary sources section written by the featured author, overviews of the author's career and general studies, and in-depth analyses of seminal works by the author.