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Edith Nesbit's The Mystery of the Semi-Detached: A Two-Minute Summary and...
Nesbit mastered the late Victorian clairvoyant tale, and this very short sketch – almost flash fiction – is an underappreciated jewel of her work. Her stories featured calamity reaching out of the...
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Fitz-James O'Brien's What Was It?: A Two-Minute Summary and Analysis of the...
Most famous in O’Brien’s oeuvre is the following episode: “What Was It?” In the original publication (which we have included), references to opium and a stark ending brooding with uncertainty enhanced...
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Edgar Allan Poe's Morella: A Two-Minute Summary and Analysis of the Classic...
The women of Poe’s tales are often polar opposites from the men who adore them. Like Berenice, the extroverted sensualist (who is mutilated by Egaeus, the reclusive intellectual) they represent what...
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Robert Louis Stevenson's Thrawn Janet: A Two-Minute Summary and Analysis of...
Robert Louis Stevenson was raised in a devout Presbyterian household. His father was a devoted Tory, and his family was proud of his trajectory to join the law profession, but in 1867 he attended...
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Bram Stoker's Dracula's Guest: A Two-Minute Summary and Analysis of the...
“Dracula’s Guest” was provocative almost as soon as it was released in 1914, and it has remained highly controversial since then – increasing in intrigue until roughly the 1970s when a sort of...
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H. G. Wells' The Door in the Wall: A Two-Minute Summary and Analysis of the...
H. G. Wells’ last truly great piece of short speculative fiction is probably the following tale. After World War One his writing became increasingly didactic, political, and preachy. Following his...
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Algernon Blackwood's The Willows: A Two-Minute Summary and Analysis of the...
Weird Fiction developed early in the Nineteenth Century with the bizarre supernatural annals of Hoffmann, Poe, and O’Brien, but the peak of its philosophy began percolating in the grotesqueries of...
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Robert W. Chambers' Cassilda's Song: A Thirty-Second Analysis of the King in...
“Cassilda’s Song” opens The King in Yellow, setting the tone for the anthology, and giving us our most liberal taste of what the eponymous play would read like, the nature of its prose and plot, and...
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Arthur Conan Doyle's The Horror of the Heights: A Two-Minute Summary and...
Doyle’s final great horror story is truly a worthy swan song – a tale who’s science fiction maintains a level of effective awe in spite of having been categorically disproven by aviators a mere decade...
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William Hope Hodgson's The Whistling Room: A Two-Minute Summary and Analysis...
Perhaps using a touch of M. R. James (cf. “Count Magnus,” “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-Book”), Hodgson riffs off of the legend that Solomon was given a series of rings by God with which he could control...
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E. T. A. Hoffmann's Councillor Krespel: A Two-Minute Summary and Analysis of...
Music has almost always been seen as a sublime expression of the unconscious: singers, players, and composers allow humanity to express and vicariously experience the most complex emotions of our...
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Washington Irving's The Adventure of the German Student: A Two-Minute Summary...
Aside from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” none of Irving’s ghost stories has had the incredible popularity – both among printers and the public – as “The Adventure of the German...
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W. W. Jacobs' The Toll-House: A Two-Minute Summary and Analysis of the...
Second to “The Monkey’s Paw” and the similarly-themed “Jerry Bundler,” “The Toll-House” is Jacobs’ most anthologized horror story, and with good reason. Few haunted house stories have ever been...
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Le Fanu's Schalken the Painter: A Summary and Full Analysis of the Classic...
Godfried Schalcken (1643 - 1706) was a Dutch master painter who studied under one of Rembrandt’s greatest pupils, attached himself to the court of William III, and was well-known for his temper,...
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The Phantom of the Opera: Historical Inspirations, Literary Analysis, & Film...
“The Opera Ghost really existed…” Such are the opening lines of Gaston Leroux’s Edwardian homage to the Belle Epoque. Pregnant with mystery, romance, and intrigue, the words usher us into a world as...
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Arthur Machen's The Bowmen: A Two-Minute Summary and Analysis of the Classic...
More than “The Great God Pan,” more than “The White People,” more than anything written in “The Three Imposters,” Machen is best known for a three-page piece of wartime propaganda that perfectly...
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E. Nesbit's The Shadow: A Two-Minute Summary and Analysis of the Classic...
“The Shadow” is Nesbit’s worthiest bid for the literary ghost story – that rare genre of powerful, elegant supernaturalism that thunders in your ears after you read it, haunts you intermittently for...
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The Shadow by E. Nesbit (with footnote annotations)
This is not an artistically rounded-off ghost story[1], and nothing is explained in it[2], and there seems to be no reason why any of it should have happened. But that is no reason why it should not be...
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Fitz-James O'Brien's The Diamond Lens: A Two-Minute Summary and Analysis of...
O’Brien has not been called the “Celtic Poe” without cause. Among the most famous of his works (after “What Was It?”), “The Diamond Lens” is rich in Poesque imagery and motifs, and yet it maintains a...
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The Nightmarish, Existential, Deeply Personal Horror Stories of Edgar Allan...
You have read Poe before. I say that with the authority of someone who was brought up in the American public education system. You have read “The Raven” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” If your school was...
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