'I am Dracula. And I bid you welcome to my house.' He is deathly pale. His fingernails are cut to sharp points. His teeth protrude menacingly from his mouth in clouds of rancid breath. Yet even Count Dracula's unnerving appearance and the frightened reaction of the local peasants fail to warn Jonathan Harker, a young man from England, about his host. Little does Jonathan know that this is a land where babies are snatched for their blood and wolves...

The story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a "haunting"; Theodora, his lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its...

One hundred years after inheriting a seven-gabled house with a dark and cursed past, Clifford and Hepzibah are old and nearly destitute. Descendants of the cursed Colonel Pyncheon, they have resorted to taking in boarders and running a struggling cent store to support themselves. When a distant relative, untouched by Colonel Pyncheon's curse, moves into the gabled house and takes over the cent store, her charm and disposition brings success to the...

In "Gothic Tales", Elizabeth Gaskell, the eminent Victorian author, brings us nine chilling gothic stories. Collected here are tales that set a precedent for ghost and horror stories of the era. In "The Poor Clare" a young innocent girl named Lucy is haunted by an unrelenting ghost invoked by her aging grandmother. In the novella "Lois the Witch" the young Lois sails to America to join her distant family. She is greeted by a New England engulfed in...

After receiving a frantic letter from her newly-wed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemi Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She's not sure what she will find--her cousin's husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemi knows little about the region. Noemi is also an unlikely rescuer: She's a glamorous debutante, and her chic gowns and perfect red lipstick are more suited...

The Italian (1797) is a novel by Ann Radcliffe. Radcliffe's final novel is a tragic story of romance and mystery set in Naples during the brutal years of the Holy Inquisition. Published in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the novel investigates the issues of religion and class that had inspired the Republican cause, changing Europe and the world forever. Considered an essential work of Gothic fiction, The Italian is an early example of her...

A Classic Gothic Mystery Novel. 'Do we fear suffering or apathy most? Is it from experience or the monotony of a commonplace existence that we quickest flee?' A newlywed couple arrives at an inn to stay for the night. They check out the next day and are never seen again. Or are they? Several years later, the owner of the inn discovers a secret room with the body of the bride in it. How can this be when she saw the couple leave her inn with her own...

A Ghostly Window Into the Past Nurse Nellie Lester can't escape death. Fleeing Chicago at the height of the 1918 Spanish flu, she takes a nursing job at a decrepit mansion on a desolate Michigan island, convinced the island holds the secret to her mother's murky past. The only problem? Her dead mother seems to have followed her there. Nightly she's haunted by a ghostly presence that appears in her bedroom. But is it her mother or something more sinister? When...

After spending more time than he can remember on his own inside a castle, an enigmatic man resolves to finally escape and seek human contact and daylight, both of which he has never experienced before. However, dissatisfied with what he finds on the outside, he hastens back to his old world inside his castle-to which he is now barred entry. First published in 1926, "The Outsider" is a short story by American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft that explores...