Literature

Frankenstein’s Mother

As Muriel Spark points out in her biography of Mary Shelley, Shelley’s lucid, rational, and straightforward prose makes the surreal horrors of her story much more effective than the inflated rhetoric of her contemporaries’ Gothic tales. 

November 19, 1987 issue

On Edgar Allan Poe

Crypts, entombments, physical morbidity: these nightmares figure prominently in Edgar Allan Poe’s tales, a fictional world in which the word that recurs most crucially is horror.

February 5, 2015 issue

The Edge of Horror

William Sloane might have become a master of the horror genre, or created an entirely new one. Yet we must be grateful for what we have, which is a splendid rediscovery.

September 18, 2015

One of America’s Best

Ambrose Bierce had no use for the refined eeriness of the English-style ghost stories of Henry James and Edith Wharton, instead setting his haunting descriptions of fateful coincidence and horrific revelation in uncut forests and abandoned mining towns.

May 10, 2012 issue