![]() Oscar Wilde described the resulting novella, first published in 1898, as “a most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale”. The Archbishop, in turn, would say no more than that he had heard it from 'a lady', a delicious example of the way Chinese whispers can propel and embellish a tale. Henry James maintained that the inspiration for The Turn of the Screw came from a story his friend the Archbishop of Canterbury told him. The Italian arguably represents year zero for many of the tropes we associate with the gothic: full of orphans, sinister monks and assassins, and set in a Catholic country where bosoms heave, kidnappers conspire and thunder and lightning strike the land. The Shadow Over Innsmouth is as good a starting point as any.Īnn Radcliffe was the First Lady of gothic fiction, and her books, written at the tail-end of the 18th century, were loved by everyone from Keats to Dostoevsky (even giving the latter sleepless nights). Lovecraft tapped into the terrifying size of the universe populating it with eldritch horrors from the deep seas and unnameable "things" from space. While many of his contemporary writers of weird fiction found fear in the small and the claustrophobic, H.P. Lovecraft spent the bulk of his formative years as a hermit, devouring books about ancient philosophy, chemistry and physics. His work-often referred to as the Cthulhu Mythos-is the distillation of this. However, Lovecraft is hardly short of admirers, with Neil Gaiman and Stephen King among the notable names citing him as a major inspiration. James was not entirely mutual-in a private letter, James referred to Lovecraft’s style of writing as “most offensive”. Oh, and that window rattling upstairs? Just ignore it. Light a fire and devote half an hour to read Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad in the quiet and you’ll find out why this story is regularly voted the scariest ever. Paring description down to the bare bones, James left plenty of space for the reader’s unconscious to do the leg work. His stories were written with the express purpose of terrifying friends and a handful or lucky (or perhaps unlucky) students attending Christmas Eve gatherings at King’s College, Cambridge. James as “a literary weird fictionist of the very first rank”. Without further ado, the masters of gothic horror. ![]() Although Shelley and Stoker are the best known novelists, there were others prominent in their field whole helped define the genre who etched the picture of the classic haunted house in all our minds who turned the sublime into tormented landscapes who ensured we would get chills down our spines and make goosebumps crawl over our skin. There's a lot more to gothic horror than Dracula and Frankenstein. ![]()
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