Thursday, 26 February 2009 23:30
THN
- Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) is one of the earliest Gothic novels and helped define the genre.
- More properly Gothic Romance than Gothic Horror, and definitely one of the seeds of modern fantasy, The History of the Caliph Vathek (1785) by William Beckford is a tale styled after those found in The Arabian Nights. Those stories had recently been translated into French and so the original version of Vathek was also written in French, although an English version was published before the French version was ready. "The descriptions of Vathek's palaces and diversions, of his scheming sorceress-mother Carathis... of his pilgrimage to the haunted ruins of Istakhar... of primordial towers and terraces in the burning moonlight of the waste, and of the terribleCyclopean halls of Eblis... are triumphs of weird colouring which raise the book to a permanent place in English letters." - H. P. Lovecraft
- Frankenstein, the Art and Legends is primarily a page of advertisements, but also briefly traces the history of the name Frankenstein and Frankenstein-like characters such as Göthe's Faust.
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus (1818). This tale was partly inspired by a proposal that Lord Byron made to her, Percy Shelley, and John Polidori in June of 1816 that they each write a ghost story. Percy Shelley's story never came of anything, Byron wrote a fragment of a novel which inspired Polidori to write The Vampyre (1819), with borrowings from Byron's plot.
- Washington Irving (1783-1859) wrote both Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - the tale of Ichabod Crane & the Headless Horseman.
- Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
- Death and mania result from visions of The Great God Pan (1894) by Arthur Machen.
- Ambrose Bierce, Can Such Things Be (1893) includes such pre-Lovecraftian short stories as "Haita the Shepherd" and "An Inhabitant of Carcosa". The Devil's Dictionary, My Favorite Murder
- Robert W. Chambers wrote The King in Yellow in 1895, developing the character of Hastur with some echoes of Bierce, which would be later adopted into H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and show up in unusual reflections in Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover stories.
- Bram Stoker, Dracula, (1897). The Irish drama critic's tale of a Transylvanian vampire in London. Left out of the original book by Stoker's editors is the short story Dracula's Guest. Also by Stoker is The Lair of the White Worm.
- Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937) is the creator of The Necronomicon and the Cthulhu Mythos - a collection of tales about nasty alien creatures from the planet Yuggoth and beyond who landed on the Earth in ages gone by and became the source of nightmares and tales of demons. William Johns has collected Lovecraft's short-stories from 1922 and earlier in the H. P. Lovecraft Library. Lovecraft was also a correspondent and collaborator with authors Clark Ashton Smith (Zothique, Averoigne), Robert E. Howard (Conan), Robert Bloch (Psycho), and Fritz Leiber (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser).
- The Short Stories of Clark Ashton Smith began appearing in the Magazine "Weird Tales" in the 1930's after H. P. Lovecraft helped the artist have a go at genre fiction. The prodigious purple prose of the loquacious lexicographer finds certain echoes from the styles of Dunsany and Eddison and in turn inspired the likes of de Camp and Vance. The plurality of Smith's work is set in the far future, undead infested continent of Zothique, although many stories are also set in ancient Hyperborea, ante-diluvian Posidonis (Atlantis), and medieval Averoigne. As a member of the Lovecraft Circle, many of his tales form part of the Cthulhu Mythos.
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Gothic Horror
