Gothic Novel Recommendations

Right after Solstice I finished the last bonus novel on my gothic reading list. I am officially done with the reading project I started last November. To celebrate, I thought I’d give quick mini-reviews of the three bonus novels and then make a quick reference of the novels I’d recommend for various readers.

First the mini-reviews:

Fledgling, by Octavia Butler: This is a vampire novel written by a science fiction author, with everything good and bad that implies. Sci-fi authors usually build these extremely detailed worlds, with complex cultural and political systems, then show us how different characters navigate these systems, and this is exactly what Fledgling does. This novel is about Shori, a young vampire with amnesia, learning to navigate the ancient and complex system of vampire laws and customs. I appreciate the thought and detail Butler put into this world and the fresh take on vampire lore, but there’s not much action and I never got emotionally invested in the characters. It would make a decent first novel for an interesting series, but sadly it’s the last book Butler wrote before she died in 2006. The novel has to stand alone, and as a single novel it’s a whole lot of explanation with very little payoff.

Flowers in the Attic by V.C. Andrews: Back in the ’80s people seemed so scandalized by this book, I wasn’t expecting it to be so tame. There’s definitely some violence and some incestuous sex, but not nearly as much as I was expecting. It was an easy read with a lot of atmosphere and family drama, with some nice suspense and intriguing hints of backstory. This is the first in a series of several books, but I probably won’t read the rest. A friend of mine read all of them when she was young, and it seems to move away from gothic horror and become more of a soap opera family drama as the series progresses.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner: Southern Gothic is much different from regular Gothic but I like it. They often have a lot in common–large southern plantations take the place of ancient castles or stately manor houses, there are often ghosts and supernatural elements in both, and both often feature family drama, secrets, and wild plot twists. Southern gothic is more likely to feature humor, ordinary or poor people, and uniquely Southern American race issues. As I Lay Dying is more uniquely southern than many Southern Gothics and much more experimental and difficult than most popular novels. It’s mostly written in a stream-of-consciousness style with a lot of Southern pronunciations and turns of phrase, making it confusing and difficult for anyone who hasn’t studied this kind of literature. If you have the experience to get through that, though, it’s funny and disgusting and sad and all the characters are interesting and emotionally compelling. I can see why it’s a classic–it’s the kind of book that grows on you as you read it again or think more about it over time.

And now that we’re done with the mini-reviews, on to the handy reference list. I haven’t included the three bonus novels above, but I am including a couple of traditional gothic greats I finished slightly before I started the project. Since I’ve blogged about almost all of these I’ll try to stick to a few key words about each, a mention of whether the book has graphic violence or not, and a very rough guide to difficulty level. If you’re not already experienced with the flowery language and wandering plotlines of Victorian (and earlier) novels, you may want to start with more modern stories and work your way backwards toward the earlier greats.

5-Star Stories:

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill–primarily a ghost story. Not graphic, language not too hard.

Perfume: the Story of a Murderer by Patrick Suskind–originally in German. Modern novel with good modern translations. Part historical novel, part horror with supernatural elements. Amazing detail and unique twist on the serial killer origin story. Some graphic elements.

In a Glass Darkly by J. Sheridan Le Fanu–actually a collection of short stories, including the amazing Carmilla. Older, more Victorian language but otherwise easy reading. Some graphic vampire violence.

4-Star Stories:

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield–half mystery, half family saga. Good gothic atmosphere, not too violent, a little lost in its own literary references. Modern language.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins–a Victorian “sensation novel” with lots of plot twists and suspense but no real horror or graphic violence.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte–this is the first and only gothic novel many people read. More realistic and “literary” than most others.

The Castle of Otranto–often presented as the first gothic novel. It moves quickly and feels a lot like a Shakespeare tragedy, with about the same level of violence and tragedy. Older language.

3-Star Stories:

Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin–heavy atmosphere and graphic violence, lots of gothic tropes throughout. Difficult language, especially in the beginning.

The Devil’s Elixirs by E.T.A. Hoffmann–originally in German, so language difficulty depends on the translation. Plot makes no sense but it’s fun anyway. Some violence.

Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier–mostly a suspense/mystery novel. Spooky atmosphere, psychological drama, not much violence. Modern language.

The Monk by Matthew Lewis–Much atmosphere and romance in the beginning, much graphic violence toward the end. Huge pacing problems but it’s one of the definitive gothic novels. Older language.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley–the novel is not as focused and suspenseful as most movie adaptations but it’s also got much deeper themes and emotional resonance. Older language.

The Italian by Anne Radcliffe–most of the sweeping family drama and rich atmosphere of gothic novels traces back to Radcliffe’s hugely popular work. Older language. Suspenseful but not graphic.

2-Star Stories:

Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux–mostly a mystery novel. More horrific than the musical. Originally French, language in translation not too difficult.

The Vampyre by John Polidori–more a short story or novella. Not the best but important for inventing the romantic vampire trope. Older language, not graphic.

White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi–beautiful language (and modern), messy plotting. Nothing too graphic that I remember.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James–probably spookier in Victorian times. No graphic violence I can recall. Flowery Victorian language.

1-Star Stories:

Vathek: an Arabian Tale by William Beckford–originally in French but written by an Englishman. Older language, 1700s-style racism. Considered a classic but hasn’t stood the test of time nearly as well as other gothic classics have.

Tales of Terror and Mystery by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle–actually short stories, not gothic in any way. Only on this list because the Tales of Terror were fun. Some graphic violence, somewhat modern language.

The Witching Hour by Anne Rice–soap opera family saga with supernatural elements. Lots of graphic violence and incest, sometimes nonsensical plotting. Language modern and easy to read. If you’re a budding teenage babybat go read all the Anne Rice you can right now, before you’re old enough to be bothered by the flawed writing. If you’re older but still love a good family saga read V.C. Andrews instead–her basic plotting and characterization are much better and what she lacks in crazy drama she makes up for in atmosphere and psychological depth.

 

Phantom of the Opera

When I think of Gason Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera all I hear is this song. NSFW y’all.

I grew up surrounded by a certain type of 1980s girly girls. Not the ones who dressed like Madonna, the ones with prairie dresses and fluffy perms. Sheltered girls who loved Jesus and wanted to keep house for a strong but tender man. I was supposed to turn out like that but I watched too many scary movies and Satan ate my soul and replaced it with brimstone. It happens sometimes.

Every one of these girly girls seemed to love Jane Austen, Titanic, and the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Weber. All of these things are apparently romantic as hell and girls I grew up with would get together specifically to watch Pride and Prejudice or listen to The Phantom of the Opera together. I was told “oh my gosh, you have to watch this!” so many times that it made me stubborn and even now I have never watched Titanic, never read Pride and Prejudice, and never listened to an Andrew Lloyd Weber song all the way through. So I wasn’t looking forward to this book. I put it off on purpose.

This might sound strange from a devotee of gothic novels, but epic romance usually leaves me cold. It’s not that I’m a cynic. I’m a believer in true love and unbreakable bonds, I love a good adventure and I’m not bothered by impossible coincidences and ridiculous plot devices. It’s more that I’m very thinky and geeky and postpunk, and the characters portrayed in these epic romances are usually very hotblooded gender stereotypes that I just can’t relate to so I don’t care deeply about whether they end up together or not. It’s boring to me in the same way celebrity news is boring to me–I just don’t care what pretty, conventional people do with their lives.

Put those same bland characters in danger, though, make them crawl through dark tunnels or lock them in dungeons, and I’ll gladly read about them. I don’t care who the bland heroine marries, but I care deeply whether she makes it out of the dungeon alive.

Phantom of the Opera definitely has epic romance to spare. Will the poor and beautiful Christine run away with the handsome and temperamental Raoul, or will she be doomed to die with the evil but tragic Phantom Erik? I get the impression that the musical focuses on this “love triangle.” In the book, Erik is about 10% tragic and 90% evil stalker/kidnapper so it’s less a love triangle and more of a rescue mission on Raoul’s part. The story is presented as being pieced together after the events are finished, from eyewitness accounts and clues the narrator has pieced together. The internet says Leroux is France’s answer to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and while this novel has no star detective it does have that mystery novel feel. It’s quite exciting as Erik’s clever tricks and traps are explained and Christine and Raoul face ever greater danger. The Paris Opera House proves to be as grand and mysterious as any gothic castle, full of trap doors and secret passages. There was enough adventure here that I found myself rooting for Christine and Raoul even though they were barely fleshed out as characters, and there were a number of fun and intriguing minor characters I enjoyed as well. Some of them provided good comic relief between more dramatic scenes.

Overall I enjoyed this novel. It was a unique twist on the gothic theme, especially in its sympathy for the villain Erik. The novel presents him as definitely the villain, but it also heavily implies that because he has never been loved by anyone, he has no real grasp on how human feelings work. He’s a psychopath, but he’s also desperate and lonely and can’t really tell right from wrong. This novel was written around 1909, and the ideas of psychology had been seeping into literature for quite a while by that time, so Leroux gives more thought to the villain’s backstory and mental state than earlier gothic novelists did. I love a good, complex villain so it was nice to read this early attempt at creating one.

I still have no plans to listen to the musical, but I might take a chance on one of the older, more horror-focused movies based on the Phantom. If you are a fan of the musical and also enjoy a bit of gothic horror, you might enjoy the book, especially if you go in expecting it to be very different from the show. I give it two haunted stars.

And with that, my official gothic reading list is done. I’m still going to read the three extra I added myself, and then my project will be done. As I’ve read through this list, it’s spawned another even longer list of gothic novels I want to read, so I may be starting another reading project as soon as this one’s done. I’m having a lot of fun reading these old stories so I hope you’re not all bored to tears by them. Oh well, what else would you expect from a Ravenclaw?

 

The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre

My soundtrack today is Dead Can Dance. This is more about the snow outside putting me in a quiet nostalgic mood than about how perfect it is for The Vampyre though, so feel free to substitute something more emo. It’s a pretty emo story.

A couple of the books on my gothic reading list are actually short stories. The Vampyre by John Polidori is only about 20 pages long but those 20 pages changed vampire stories completely by introducing the romantic vampire into the literary world.

The story started as a half-formed idea of Lord Byron’s, his contribution to the famous contest that spawned Frankenstein. Byron lost interest in the story but his friend/employee John Polidori took it up and reworked it into the Vampyre. The story’s main character, Lord Ruthven, is what we now see so often in vampire stories–brooding, magnetic, irresistible, using up young men and women alike and leaving them ruined while he himself is untouched by the tragedies he causes.

Polidori based the character on Lord Byron, with whom he had a rocky relationship. Polidori never meant to have the story published. In fact, when it was first published without Polidori’s permission the story was attributed to Lord Byron. Polidori was never able to straighten out the mess and never able to move on from Byron’s mistreatment of him. Eventually he fell into depression and drinking and committed suicide, adding an uncomfortable stab of reality to the idea of Byron as a charismatic vampire carelessly ruining young lives.

This is available on Project Gutenberg but I actually read it as part of an anthology called, sensibly enough, The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre. It included a sampling of horror tales popular in magazines of the era. The other stories are quite varied, running from gritty crime stories to darkly funny morality tales to poetic tragedies in the traditional gothic style. I won’t review them in detail, but some were quite good. I especially like the anonymous Life in Death, which I can’t find a link to online, and Letitia E. Landon’s The Bride of Lindorf. This one is beautifully written and nicely gothic in the Ann Radcliffe tradition. If you’ve wondered about the old gothic tales but didn’t want to commit to a whole novel, The Bride of Lindorf is a wonderful taste of what they’re about.

To the whole book I’d give three haunted stars, but to just The Vampyre I’d give two. It’s inventive and important, but not the most compelling gothic story. As a piece of art, Carmilla was much more exciting. But I feel bad for Polidori because Lord Byron sounds like a real asshole.

Melmoth the Wanderer

The soundtrack for this is Bauhaus. Only the gothest of goth bands for the bleakest yet most darkly funny of gothic novels. Queue up your favorite tracks and follow the tale of Melmoth The Wanderer by Charles Maturin.

 

I read Melmoth on and off over several weeks. Project Gutenberg has it for free download in four volumes. It’s less a novel and more a series of nested stories, all centered around encounters with the titular Melmoth the Wanderer. The book begins with John Melmoth, a college student visiting his miserly uncle on his deathbed, who discovers a manuscript detailing an encounter with John’s ancestor, the legendary Melmoth the Wanderer. The Wanderer was a practitioner of the dark and secret arts–the book isn’t much more specific than that–and sold his soul to the devil for 150 more years of life, only to find he was cursed to spend that 150 years trying to tempt other desperate people to sell their souls and fulfill the bargain in his place. The Wanderer’s search takes him to a mental asylum, to the dungeons of the Inquisition, to great families fallen on hard times, to heartbroken women, to shipwrecked sailors and desperate prisoners, and finally to a young girl stranded alone on an island. He falls in love with this stranded girl and she, in spite of his cursed state and evil disposition, falls in love with him. Of course, this forbidden love ends most tragically of all, and in spite of searching and seducing for 150 years the Wanderer finds not one person who will forsake God and take his place, and after all that he returns to his ancestral home (where he meets his descendent John Melmoth briefly) and faces his death and eternal damnation.

The Wanderer’s story, though, is only the thread that holds together the real, meaty stories in the novel. Most of the book is about the adventures and misfortunes that led each character to their desperate states. The book’s general atmosphere is incredibly dark and despairing as one character after another reaches the lowest point in their life only to be tormented by this accursed Wanderer, who offers to save them if only they’ll sell their souls, and when they refuse the Wanderer just leaves them to whatever horrible fate awaits them, whether they deserve it or not. Most of the characters, in fact, are innocent and trapped by circumstances beyond their control, making it even sadder that no one is coming to save them.

A fun bit of trivia that relates–Oscar Wilde, exiled from Ireland after serving jail time for “gross indecency” after being outed as gay, called himself Sebastian Melmoth after gay icon Saint Sebastian and damned wanderer Melmoth. In terms of plot and characters, this is a gothic novel through and through, but in terms of theme it has more in common with modern existentialists and dark realists like Steinbeck or McCarthy or Sartre and De Beauvoir. I found that really fascinating. It’s dark stuff, and it’s difficult to read over a thousand pages of that stuff without getting exhausted or depressed, which is why I ended up reading this in bits over several weeks. The episodic style of storytelling made it easy to break the story into easy chunks. I’d read and have fun, and when the existential despair got too much I’d take a break and read lighter horror. (I read The Girl with all the Gifts at the same time as Melmoth and it was a great palate cleanser.)

Melmoth the Wanderer is often considered the last of the gothic classics in the British tradition and it’s by far the bleakest, but it’s also got a lot of humor and camp and the stories are often darkly funny. Like Matthew Lewis in The Monk, Maturin seems to know how campy and exaggerated his stories are and to enjoy taking the gothic drama to the most ridiculous heights he can think of. He’s also quite good at writing in visual details of places and people that round out the characters and pull you into the story even at its most unbelievable. There are great moments of both drama and comedy and the book as a whole rocks between hope in a a glorious afterlife for these good people and a stark declaration that whatever the afterlife brings, this life is filled with sorrow and evil.

Maturin started his career an Irish Protestant preacher, and this definitely informs his writing both on the surface and on a deeper level. On the surface, his opinions on organized religion are pretty clear–he’s anti-Catholic, antisemitic, deeply opinionated about various Protestant controversies I couldn’t really follow, and believes all the worst exaggerations of Hinduism, while piously praising the pure worship of Jesus as the best and only hope for humanity (he makes clear that atheism is as stupid as all those other stupid religions). At times he was so mean-spirited I worried I should be offended, but he was so over-the-top mean about every religion ( including his own at times) I just started to laugh at him.

On a deep level, he seems much more conflicted about faith, wanting to tell us a hopeful moral sermon while mostly telling us lurid tales of temptation and horror instead. He’s trying to tell us no one, no matter how desperate, would willingly let Satan into her life while showing us villain after villain who profess their faith and goodness while screwing over innocent people. It’s such an interesting mix of faith and bitterness.

I give Melmoth the Wanderer a solid 3 Haunted House rating. I didn’t enjoy every minute of it but I’ve been finished for a couple of weeks now and I’m still thinking about it. While not the most readable, it truly is a great peak among gothic novels.

 

 

In a Glass Darkly

Before we get started, here’s some music to set the mood:

I slowed down but didn’t stop my gothic novel project over the summer. I managed to read John Polidori’s The Vampyre, which I’ll review later, and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly. This is the book that features the famous Carmilla; you might be tempted to skip straight to that one but the rest of the stories are also worth your time.

You might already know that “in a glass darkly” is a Biblical reference about how we in this life see only glimpses of the world beyond. It’s a fitting title for Le Fanu’s collection of stories, which pretends to be the case notes of Doctor Martin Hesselius, who studies and helps people who see too much of the world beyond and suffer for it.

There are five stories–Green Tea, The Familiar, Mr. Justice Harbottle, the Room in the Dragon Volant, and Carmilla. The first three are heavily psychological and each is more spooky and interesting than the last. Justice Harbottle was my favorite of these three, with an excellent combination of psychological guilt and supernatural vengeance. The Room in the Dragon Volant lightens things up a bit with a mystery adventure. The narrator of this one is looking back on his foolish youth with a mix of nostalgia and embarrassment at the trouble he got into. I found it quite fun–humor doesn’t always translate across the centuries but this one works.

And then He gives us Carmilla. Le Fanu deserves to be remembered for more than Carmilla–he has an exciting and readable style and his stories are a lot of fun–but Carmilla is a true gem of gothic storytelling. Le Fanu has a real gift for making standard gothic tropes seem fresh and personal–the remote castle, the lonely young maiden, the predator in the night all feel real and moving, and the story builds nicely from lonely longing to spooky tension to a fairly gruesome finish. This is the original charming vampire story–people are more familiar with Bram Stoker’s story but Dracula borrowed heavily from Carmilla.

Much has been made of Carmilla as the original lesbian vampire and perhaps that’s why this story hasn’t kept its fame as well as it deserves. Some people probably can’t see past that fact into the nuance of the story. Most, if not all, modern adaptations of Carmilla are pretty campy and simplistic. It’s a shame, because the romantic tension between the narrator, Laura, and Carmilla is fascinating and full of layers. There’s clearly passion and sensuality between the two but its exact nature is up to the reader to decide.

It’s not at all clear that Laura is gay. Victorian stories are full of female best friends who are passionate without being sexual–I think this comes from the Victorian idea of well bred women being so pure and innocent they don’t think about sex ever (it would never occur to these characters to have sex, even if they sleep in the same bed).  and we can’t even be certain that Carmilla is gay–it’s possible she targets young women because that’s what she looks like and it’s easy for her to worm her way into other young women’s lives. But she could be in love with Laura. She could be looking for a companion in death. We just don’t know.

This story is the root of so many modern vampire stories, it’s a shame Carmilla herself hasn’t been explored more. She’s an utterly compelling villain and I would love to see a screen adaptation worthy of her.

I give this book 5 stars and I’ll definitely be exploring Le Fanu’s other writings sometime soon.

The Thirteenth Review

I’m trying to get in the mood for this review, sitting in my comfy chair with the lights dimmed, listening to Grouper, but my kids keep slamming into things and ruining the atmosphere. But maybe you can enjoy some atmosphere while you read:

 

The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield is also the thirteenth book I’ve reviewed for my Gothic novel project. Amazingly, I did not do this on purpose. It’s just a beautiful gothic coincidence. The kind of thing that makes me believe in magic and mystery just a little bit.

I quite liked this novel. It didn’t have much action or horror but the writing was carefully designed to create a mysterious, dreamy atmosphere that I really enjoyed. The story centers around a quiet bookish biographer named Margaret and a famously secretive author, Vida Winter, who wants to finally tell the true story of her life. The story weaves between Vida’s sad and mysterious tale and Margaret’s own investigations into the truth of Vida’s story. As Vida reveals her story and unburdens herself of secrets, Margaret grows and faces some uncomfortable truths about herself and her own family. Though it borrows heavily from gothic tropes–ghosts, moors, crumbling manor houses, family secrets–the book’s tone and themes remind me of nothing more than Shirley Jackson’s novels. If you love The Haunting of Hill House or We Have Always Lived in the Castle, you will probably love this book almost as much.

It’s a very academic novel, though. I could tell even before I looked her up that Setterfield had studied literature pretty seriously. In some ways that’s good–for a debut novel this is incredibly well crafted and beautiful, and I’m sure that’s due to her background. In some ways that’s less good–her writing feels a tad detached and academic at times and her many allusions to gothic classics sometimes get in the way of a good story.

She references and echoes Jane Eyre, The Turn of the Screw, The Woman in White, Wuthering Heights and many more literary classics but you don’t need to read those to understand The Thirteenth Tale. In fact, it might be better if you haven’t read them. While I was reading I wasn’t bothered at all by these echoes but now that I’m done it’s easy to pick through and see how she stole this bit from Wuthering Heights and stitched it to that bit from Jane Eyre and then trimmed the edges with Sherlock Holmes, and the story that seemed so seamless and smooth as I read it now starts to look like a Frankenstein’s monster patched together from older books.

Still, even with that I loved the atmosphere of the book and became very involved with the characters, who are a bit stylized but well drawn and mostly very likable. As the story wrapped up I found myself in tears, both happy and sad. Though I read this at the height of summer in between holidays and travel, it’s a perfect book to curl up with on a cold winter’s night. Four stars.

 

The Witching Hour

This post continues my gothic novel reading project. Only 5 more books to go.

I grew up on Anne Rice’s vampires. As an adult I know they’re not the most deep or brilliant novels, but they’re fun and dramatic and I still have fond memories of them. The Witching Hour is very long at over a thousand pages, but still, I thought I was in for an easy read and a fun trip down memory lane.

What I actually got was much more ambitious and much more horribly written than I expected.

The Witching Hour tells the story of the Mayfair family and of the Talamasca, a mysterious organization that studies and spies on them. The story spans centuries, following generation after generation of Mayfairs and the agents who spy on them. It also zooms in for a close view of Rowan Mayfair as she becomes the heir to the Mayfair legacy, which includes billions of dollars and a mysterious spiritual companion named Lasher. There are so many elements of great story here–colorful characters down the generations, mysteries and betrayals, strange witchy powers and burning questions about the Talamasca and its motives. It all leads up to a dramatic and fairly horrific ending that I really enjoyed.

Still, even with all this going for it, The Witching Hour was the most agonizingly boring book I’ve read in years. It’s full of little side stories that are neither exciting nor important. The main story centers around a single line of witches, one per generation, but instead of bringing these characters to life Rice wastes page after page describing scullery maids and distant cousins and detectives hired by the Talamasca. The main characters often get lost in this mess of details. It’s also extremely repetitive–a character will see something spooky, then call up a friend and describe the spooky thing they saw, then that friend will write about that spooky thing in his notes, then they’ll talk about whether to tell yet another character about the spooky thing . . . and by the time they’re all done talking about it nothing seems spooky at all. This book needed serious, serious editing. You could easily cut two or three hundred pages and have a tighter, more exciting story with plenty of gothic flavor left.

I wanted to love this book. It should have been, could have been a grand and sweeping gothic drama but it was so unfocused and weighed down with distracting little side notes that I could never just sit back and enjoy the big picture. All that wasted dramatic potential just made me sad and grumpy. I give it one star.

Before I let you go, I should offer a quick content warning: The Witching Hour contains a fair amount of graphic sexual content, including incest and rape. This book is not for the sensitive reader.

I actually finished this over a week ago, but family visits delayed my review. I’ve already started The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield and so far I’m finding it has all the spooky atmosphere The Witching Hour lacked. I have high hopes for this one.

Tales of Terror and Mystery

For anyone not in the know by now, I’ve been on a quest to read the classics of gothic literature. I’ve been working from a list. By now I’ve read about 80% of the books on this list and it’s proven pretty solid. Almost all the books are either important, beautiful, groundbreaking, thrilling, or some combination of those. Except for this one. Tales of Terror and Mystery, a collection of stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was not great. It was meh. I don’t understand how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle made it on the list, and I really don’t understand why this particular collection made the list. Only some of the stories are horror and none of them are particularly gothic, and they’re certainly not among Doyle’s best or most famous stories. I’m baffled, really.

The Tales of Terror and the Tales of Mystery are actually two distinct halves of the book.  To start with the second half, the Tales of Mystery were profoundly disappointing. Doyle clearly knows how to write a mystery–Sherlock Holmes endures for good reason–but these aren’t his best. They feel like half-finished ideas that weren’t good enough for Sherlock to bother with. Unless you’re a diehard Doyle fan they’re not worth your time.

The Tales of Terror, however, were pretty good. “The Case of Lady Sannox” and “The Brazilian Cat” were tense little tales, and “The New Catacomb” was a nice twist on the theme of Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado”. These stories are worth an evening of your time. But they’re not on Poe’s level, or even Lovecraft’s. And speaking of Lovecraft, he’s not on this list at all, but he probably should be instead of Doyle. Lovecraft has become a controversial author in recent years (because he was really really racist), so I can see why someone might leave him off to avoid issues, but I wouldn’t replace him with this set of mostly forgettable stories. 

I give this one Haunted House and a deep sigh.

The Woman in White

Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White is not a horror novel. It’s pretty gothic, featuring a damsel in distress and her mysterious doppelganger, a bleak manor house falling to ruin, and several improbable plot twists, but it’s not a horror novel no matter what my list claims. It’s more of a mystery, almost a detective novel. Our hero, Mr. Hartright, isn’t a professional detective but he is investigating a terrible mystery. The story is mostly his case notes–statements from witnesses, explanations from lawyers, a diary of Hartright’s own attempts to solve the mystery and save his lady love. It was all very dramatic, a mystery with a nice foreboding atmosphere.

This is pretty common with gothic novels, but all the characters in this book are a bit flat and cartoonish. Mr. Hartright is so perfectly noble, the damsel in distress is pretty and sweet and nothing else, her husband Sir Percival is a hot-tempered jerk, and none of them really change as the story progresses. The main characters are nothing special. The minor characters really steal the show–the titular woman in white is odd and tragic, the damsel’s uncle is extremely punchable, the villainous Count Fosco is very likable in spite of being an evil genius, and there are many more well-drawn minor players in this drama. Many of these characters get chances to speak for themselves, either in witness statements or in direct quotes written in Mr. Hartright’s case notes, and this really brings these minor characters to life. These minor players were the highlights of the book for me.

I also enjoyed the plot, though. It was clever and largely based on Collins’s legal knowledge. I’m being really vague about it because I don’t want to ruin the mystery. Many gothic plots are either really obvious or so weird you can’t possibly guess what will happen next, but The Woman in White hits a sweet spot between these two extremes. It was delicious to watch the plot unfold and I don’t want to spoil it for anyone else. I know this is an old book (published in 1859) but it’s a pretty minor classic so many people won’t know a lot about it. I know I didn’t.

Speaking of publishing, this was originally a serial novel, published one chapter at a time in a literary magazine run by Charles Dickens. It’s written with lots of memorable scenes and cliffhangers throughout, designed to keep readers excited for each new chapter. Being a serial also explains the cartoonish characters–flat, exaggerated characters are fun and easy to remember from week to week, and you can gossip about them with friends just the way people do now about popular TV or internet series.

Being a serial probably explains the two endings as well. Without giving too much away, there are two main villains: Sir Percival and his friend Count Fosco. Our hero is after both of them, but he catches up to Sir Percival first, with dramatic and satisfying results. It’s a great scene and would have been a great ending, but instead Collins drags the story out for several more chapters while our hero tries to defeat Count Fosco. It’s a little weak and random, as if someone asked Collins to stretch out the story so they could fill an extra few issues of the magazine. Serial novels are kind of notorious for stretching on too long, and this one is definitely guilty.

Still, I enjoyed this book quite a bit and I highly recommend it. It’s especially good for people who love Victorian atmosphere and a bit of drama but don’t love blood and guts. This story is thrilling and a bit spooky in places, but it’s not violent or horrific at all. I give it four haunted mansions for being a worthy addition to the Ann Radcliffe  “terror not horror” tradition.

The Devil’s Elixirs is a Complicated Novel

I finally finished E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Devil’s Elixirs. Since Hoffmann wrote in German and I know maybe thirty German words at most, I read this in translation. The one I happened to pick up is by Ronald Taylor and I have no complaints about it. The English was smooth and easy to read. The novel was confusing in parts, but I think that’s the story’s fault, not the translator’s. I’m sure the story is just as complicated in German. The novel is narrated by the monk Medardus, who becomes the center of not one but two very complicated storylines.

The first starts out pretty simply: Medardus was born in a convent and raised to become a monk. He wants to be a good person, devoted to his faith, but he has a deep well of lust and pride and eventually the temptation is too much for him. He abandons his monastery to see the world and find the woman of his dreams. Fate, aided by the Devil’s Elixir (a holy relic he stole from his monastery), leads him to his doppelganger, a stranger who looks exactly like him. From that moment, both men’s fates are intertwined as Medardus becomes a debauched murderer and his doppelganger is blamed for Medardus’s own crimes. Medardus struggles with guilt that almost drives him mad, but even as he repents and returns to his faith he is still sorely tempted by pride and lust. The details get a bit confusing, but the way the two men’s stories intertwine gives the book a sense of drama and mystery that I quite liked.

The second plot explains why Medardus and his doppelganger look so much alike. This plot is so complicated that I resorted to writing diagrams of it, and even with that I’m confused on a few points. But this I know: Medardus and his doppelganger are half-brothers, the last brothers in a long line of incestuous, murderous sinners. It is up to them to resist foul temptation and end their cursed, sinful line forever. Neither man knows his family’s full story, and their ignorance only leads them further into temptation.

On the one hand, the confusing plots were no big deal, because the book is a lot of fun and Medardus’s emotional struggles are relatable and easy to understand. All the really important plot points are perfectly clear and exciting to read. On the other hand I got really frustrated–why make me puzzle out these crazy plot twists and impossible family connections if they’re not even important to the story? They’re just a distraction from the main conflicts.

There’s way too much confusion, but some of it serves a purpose. While the novel searches the depths of Medardus’s soul, it also questions the nature of reality. The lines between natural and supernatural, reality and hallucination, madness and conscience are all blurred. The main plot is confused partly because Medardus himself sometimes loses track of which are his own crimes and which are his doppelganger’s. At times the plot is like a hall of mirrors, where it’s hard to tell what’s real and which way to go. It’s silly and fun, but also deeply disturbing.

I enjoyed this novel. I’m not sure I entirely understood it, but I enjoyed it. The Devil’s Elixirs was inspired by Matthew Lewis’s infamous novel The Monk (which I read), and the parallels are pretty clear. Both are about young, handsome monks seduced by the world’s temptations and, more specifically, hot women who look like saints. Both feature intrigue and murder and Satanic forces. I think Hoffmann did it better, though. Both novels have their flaws, but Hoffmann’s characters are much more compelling and nuanced. Lewis is mostly trying to shock and excite his audience, but Hoffmann wants us to feel something more than that, and I think he succeeds.

I give The Devil’s Elixirs three haunted stars for high drama and thematic depth.