The Turn of the Screw (Vintage Classics) This curious little novella by Henry James (Washington Square), published in 1898, is arguably the best in the horror genre. It has been made into a successful film (The Innocents with Deborah Kerr) and spawned a whole army of copycats. An impressionable governess is hired to look after two orphaned children in a gothic mansion. In no time she discovers that she, the children and the housekeeper are not alone. On the grounds of the estate she sees the dark figures of a man and a woman she does not recognise. When she realises that she is the only one who can see them, she begins to suspect something supernatural is at play. The housekeeper later tells her the eerie history of the house: the former governess, who had had an illicit affair with a man, had died with him under mysterious circumstances. She also finds out that the two children had been very attached to the dead governess, and that they may be in secret communion with the spirits of her and her lover… James spooks by using suggestive language and imagery (think Bronte’s Jane Eyre). What also makes it a fascinating psychological work is its questioning of perception and sanity.
The Masque of the Red Death (Penguin Classics)
This short story by the Maestro of Horror Edgar Allan Poe has puzzled readers for more than a century (first published in 1842) with its possibly allegorical content. A prince thinks he can escape the red plague by confining himself and some wealthy nobles to his abbey. For entertainment, he holds a masquerade ball in seven rooms painted in seven different colours, the last of which is entirely in black and illuminated by a red light. No-one is brave enough to enter this last room until a mysterious figure in a dark robe wearing a skull-like mask appears among them. The prince chases the figure into the seventh room, and then things begin to go wrong, horribly wrong. Cryptic, gruesome, this is Poe at his morbid best.
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