Whether it’s vampires or werewolves or mysterious patterns in wallpaper, writers of Gothic short stories have used all sorts of horrors and frights to chill our blood, ever since the horror short story developed in the early nineteenth century. Below, we pick ten of the very best Gothic horror tales which you can find online.
Literature
March 18, 2021, 2:35pm John Updike, with one notable exception, was an incredibly kind reviewer. Patricia Lockwood, in her London Review of Books survey of Updike’s work, observed Updike’s criticism “was not just game and generous but able, as his fiction is not, to reach deeply into the objectives of other human beings.” In the
TODAY: In 1893, English poet and soldier Wilfred Owen is born. “It’s possible much of what I’ve written in recent years will wind up being published or produced posthumously… or not at all.” Jay Neugeboren reflects on mortality and posthumous publishing, after 60 years of the writing life. | Lit Hub After writing a novel
The story or ‘history’ of Tom Thumb is the oldest English fairy story that we have in printed form. Other fairy tales may well be older – indeed, almost certainly are if we trace the antecedents of stories such as ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ back some 4,000 years – but the oldest extant printed copy of a fairy
March 17, 2021, 2:14pm St. Patrick’s Day is upon us, a chairde, and what better way to mark the occasion than by curling up with a novel penned by an author from the Emerald Isle. The trouble is, there are far too many wonderful options to choose from: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last
TODAY: In 1948, William Gibson, father of cyberpunk, is born. On the two kinds of Nabokov readers: those who think he “illuminates the real world, and those who think he is confined to a literary playground.” | Lit Hub Criticism “We’re not hooked by what the protagonist is doing; we’re on the hunt for why they’re doing it.” Lisa
Antigone is, after Oedipus Rex, the most famous of Sophocles’ plays to survive. Written over 2,400 years ago, Antigone is one of the finest examples of Greek tragedy: the play explores its central moral issue through its two main characters, Antigone and Creon, and remains as relevant now as it was when Sophocles first wrote
March 16, 2021, 2:22pm Since its publication in 2015, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer has become one of the most widely celebrated debuts in recent memory—winning the Pulitzer Prize, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and the Edgar Award for Best First Novel (among others),
TODAY: In 1883, Australian poet, essayist, novelist and painter Ethel Anderson is born. “I found myself straddling two very different identities, as a committed nun and as a woman experiencing myself as a sexual person for the first time.” Patricia M. Dwyer on the life-changing, “in-between” poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. | Lit Hub Criticism Paul
Dated ‘Missolonghi, Jan. 22, 1824’, ‘On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year’ is a poem Lord Byron wrote on his 36th birthday, less than three months before he died. Byron was at Missolonghi, in Greece, fighting with the Greeks in their war for independence. It’s one of Byron’s most meditative and personal poems, and
March 15, 2021, 4:50pm Sic semper tyrannis—a quote attributed to Brutus, one of Julius Caesar’s assassins; the motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia; and the cry of John Wilkes Booth right after he shot Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Theatre in 1865. Although one might imagine John Wilkes Booth was referring to the commonwealth’s motto, it’s
TODAY: In 1959, Nigerian writer Ben Okri is born. “We downplay issues with food as just par for the course, the cost of doing business in girlhood.” Emily Layden on eating disorders and the secret lives of teenage girls. | Lit Hub If we can’t live in the utopia of a world without emails, Cal Newport suggests
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the rainbow has often been used in literature, religion, and art to symbolise the bridge between the land and the sky, the earth and heavens. But rainbow symbolism is also wide-ranging in different cultures, so it’s worth exploring the different meanings of the rainbow throughout the centuries, and in different religions and works
March 12, 2021, 11:23am Art by Xavier Marabout When I was a kid, I loved the Tintin books. I had every one (except the ones that Hergé pulled from print due to their racist undertones), and a poster, and a little stuffed Snowy to boot. I probably shouldn’t admit this on the internet, but at
March 12, 2021, 12:00pm Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (not to be confused with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein) is, to my mind, the single greatest horror story ever written, as well as the single greatest work of art ever created by a teenager (with apologies to Messrs. Mozart, Picasso, and Wonder). Shelley’s Gothic fireside-yarn-turned-novel is the story of
‘The Country of the Blind’ is one of H. G. Wells’s finest short stories, published in The Strand magazine in 1904 and then collected in Wells’s short-story collection The Country of the Blind and Other Stories in 1911. It belongs to his early phase, when – during the ten or so years following the publication
TODAY: In 1892, American writer and journalist Janet Flanner, who served as the Paris correspondent of The New Yorker magazine from 1925 until 1975, is born. Nineteen ways of looking at Marilynn Robinson: Kevin Brockmeier on the literary prowess (and workshop advice) of an American icon. | Lit Hub “With each new agent, each foray into
March 12, 2021, 12:18pm Shed Simove insists that he has bad timing. For eighteen years, the London-based writer has been working on his manuscript about a pandemic—only to attempt to publish it during a pandemic. Amid the throes of COVID-19 is perhaps not the best moment for Simove’s novel Alpha Male, a story about a