Showing results by author "Sheridan le Fanu" in All Categories

Laura lives an isolated life with her father, alone in a castle in the Austrian wilderness. When the mysterious Carmilla, a strange and beautiful lady, arrives in the night, no one suspects the supernatural occurrences that follow. But still more unsuspected is the tempestuous romance that blooms between the two young women, and Carmilla’s nightmarish secret. Written 26 years before Stoker’s "Dracula", Carmilla is the original vampire novel. Sheridan Le Fanu combines a chilling Gothic atmosphere with horrifying episodes, boldly exploring the sexual desires of his heroines, and establishing the image of the female vampire.

In an isolated castle deep in the Austrian forest, Laura leads a solitary life with only her ailing father for company. Until one moonlit night, a horse-drawn carriage crashes into view, carrying an unexpected guest—the beautiful Carmilla. So begins a feverish friendship between Laura and her mysterious, entrancing companion. But as Carmilla becomes increasingly strange and volatile, prone to eerie nocturnal wanderings, Laura finds herself tormented by nightmares and growing weaker by the day.

Tief in den abgelegenen Wäldern der Steiermark, in einem einsamen Schloss zwischen dunklen Tannen und nebelverhangenen Ruinen, lebt die junge Laura mit ihrem Vater ein stilles, zurückgezogenes Leben. Die Einsamkeit lastet schwer auf ihr – bis ein rätselhafter Unfall eine geheimnisvolle...

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form... As may naturally be expected of a form so closely connected with primal emotion, the horror-tale is as old as human thought and speech themselves.

When the tale begins, a strange and sudden malady is claiming the lives of the local peasants in Styria. Laura, an innocent girl of eighteen, lives a lonely life there with her loving father and two governesses. Then a dramatic coach crash on Laura’s doorstep brings a mysterious, beautiful...

Love has many forms, many needs. Some fall into the dark, into the shadows. Forbidden love has connotations of desire, of possession but also of matters far more unsavoury. It’s a delicate facet of love that our classic authors explain with careful words and superbly crafted narratives.

The Irish Short Story tradition is packed with literary leviathans who take the raw ingredients of the land, it’s people and their own talents to create quite dazzling narratives in these perfectly pitched short stories. Genius has many names.

Laura grew up on a castle in the Austrian mountains with her father, slightly lonely as there are no potential companions around. Her loneliness is at an end when a carriage accindent close by their castle brings a mysterious visitor: Carmilla was injured in the accident, and remains at the castle to heal. But there is something dark about Carmilla. Is Laura in danger? - Summary by Carolin

Carmilla, el clásico vampírico de Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, se anticipó en un cuarto de siglo al Drácula de Bram Stoker, pero su valor va mucho más allá que el de ser el antecedente femenino del famoso conde de Transilvania. La escabrosa y atrevida relación entre sus protagonistas, Laura y Carmilla, aún hoy resulta sorprendente. La temática de la femme fatale alcanza aquí su máximo exponente, y los ecos de esta magnífica novela gótica la convierten en uno de los principales referentes del terror que se escribe en la actualidad.

Contents: Edgar Allan Poe - The Murders in the Rue Morgue - The Gold Bug - The Black Cat - The Pit and the Pendulum - The Tell-Tale Heart - The Fall of the House of Usher - The Masque of the Red Death - The Cask of Amontillado - The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar - Hop-Frog - The RavenBram Stoker - DraculaMary Shelley - FrankensteinJoseph Sheridan Le Fanu - CarmillaRobert Louis Stevenson - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. HydeH.P. Lovecraft - The Alchemist - At the Mountains of Madness - Azathoth - The Beast in the Cave.

This is a story from The Moonlit Road collection. These five 19th-century ghost stories from both sides of the Atlantic provide some of the best chills in the genre. Ambrose Bierce is well-known, but "To Let" by B. M. Croker and "The Upper Berth" also provide moments to tingle the spine, as does "An Account of Some Strange Disturbances" by Le Fanu. This collection, which is further enhanced by suitably chilling music, was originally released under the title Classic Chilling Tales 3.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873) was born in Dublin, Ireland and is acknowledged as an influential writer in the genre of gothic and supernatural fiction of the 19th century. Many of his short stories were originally published in various magazines. Here are six of them: “The White Cat of Drumgonnial”, “Dickon the Devil”, “The Drunkard's Dream”, “The Secret of the Two Plaster Casts”, “The Vision of Tom Chuff”, and “An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House”.

Green Tea is the story of the Reverend Jennings, who consumes copious amounts of green tea while pursuing his esoteric interests late at night. When something goes wrong, he approaches Doctor Hesselius, who sets out the narrative in the form of a series of letters to another physician. He discusses the symptoms of the clergyman’s mysterious affliction, which torments him and interferes with his services. The illness appears to be mental rather than physical.

Due to an unfortunate series of events, a teenage girl named Carmilla is left in the care of a wealthy widower and his daughter, Laura. Laura, upon meeting the poor girl, comes to realize that she knows her face. Years prior when she was but a child, Laura was haunted by a presence in her room with the likeness of the young girl. Convinced it was just a nightmare, Laura and Carmilla become fast friends. But as Carmilla's stay continues, strange things begin to happen to the townspeople nearby.

A masterful collection of horror fiction by widely acclaimed authors whose contributions to the genre have been lost in the shadow of Poe. Edgar Allan Poe did not invent the tale of terror. There were American, English, and continental writers who preceded Poe and influenced his work. Similarly, there were many who were in turn influenced by Poe's genius and produced their own popular tales of supernatural literature.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was one of the major figures of 19th-century supernaturalism. He helped move supernaturalist fiction away from the gothic's emphasis on external sources of terror and toward a focus on the effects of terror, thus helping to create the psychological basis for supernaturalist and horror literature that continues today. "The Familiar" is one of his most terrifying tales.

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. In the candlelit studio of a Dutch master, the young apprentice Godfried Schalken loves his teacher's beautiful niece, Rose – and dares to dream she might one day be his. Then a stranger comes to the door: Mynheer Vanderhausen of Rotterdam, immensely...

In this series we explore the many facets of love through literary talents that span both time and country. Love is good. It’s positive, a source of joy, nourishment and all over goodness. But sometimes other more malevolent forces come to play. They infect that love, they see their form as better. Instinctively we would shy away but sometimes its pull is too powerful, almost attractive. We are drawn closer into the shadows.

Maud Ruthyn, the young, naive heroine, has a governess who is an enigmatic older woman, a liar, bully, and spy, who takes a dark secret with her when she leaves. Maud is then orphaned and moves in with her Uncle Silas, her father's mysterious brother and a man with a scandalous - even murderous - past. She is horrified to find her former governess appears in her life again, in this Gothic Victorian psychological thriller, with a touch of the occult.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu...was in his own particular vein one of the best story-tellers of the nineteenth century; and the present volume contains a collection of forgotten tales by him, and of tales not previously known to be his. He stands absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories. That is my deliberate verdict, after reading all the supernatural tales I have been able to get hold of. Nobody sets the scene better than he, nobody touches in the effective detail more deftly. Ghost stories and tales of mystery are what this volume contains, and, in order to lure the reader on, I ...