Horror Stories – Interesting Literature

The Best of the Horror Story

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a new anthology of classic horror stories

Shortly after receiving my review copies of Darryl Jones’s informative and engaging history of the horror genre, Sleeping with the Lights On, the publishers, Oxford University Press, sent me another recent publication Darryl Jones has worked on for them: a wonderfully expansive and well-selected collection of horror stories from E. T. A. Hoffman to the modern age, Horror Stories: Classic Tales from Hoffmann to Hodgson (Oxford World’s Classics).

A Short Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Recently we put together a brief plot summary of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, Edgar Allan Poe’s short but terrifying story about a prince who retreats to his castellated abbey with a thousand of his courtiers, to avoid the horrific and fast-acting plague known as the ‘Red Death’. Now, it’s time for some words of analysis concerning this intriguing story which, like many of Poe’s best stories, seems to work on several levels.

Interesting Literary Facts for Halloween

‘It was a dark and stormy night…’ as Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton began his 1830 novel Paul Clifford (and, in doing so, gave us perhaps the most famous – or infamous – opening line of them all). Since Halloween is looming, we at Interesting Literature thought we’d blow the dust off some mouldy tomes in the Gothic library here at the Castle, in order to bring you some of the most eye-watering literary facts and fancies from the season.