Inhabited: Classic Haunted House Stories

by Henry James et al (Contribution by)

Overview

Houses creak, shudder, moan, whistle, and whine. With eye-like windows and doors that appear, at night, like tunnel entrances to the unknown, houses lend themselves to our primal and persistent sense of living among ghosts. It is not difficult to imagine our ancestors conjuring tales of haunted places as they sat around fires casting shadows on cave walls. Folklore is rife with such stories and it is no wonder that our earliest literature-from a letter written by Pliny the Younger (61-c. 112), in which he describes a haunted villa in Athens to One Thousand and One Nights-include accounts of possessed places and eerie abodes. The notion that houses are repositories of events-even possibly cemeteries of previous occupants-is by no means extinguished by the explanations of toxicologists, physicists, and psychologists. The American folklorist Louis C. Jones observed, "It might be expected that a rational age of science would destroy belief in the ability of the dead to return. I think it works the other way: in an age of scientific miracles anything seems possible." Contemporary tales of haunted houses like The Amityville Horror, The Haunting of Hill House, and Red Rose follow a through line shaped by some of the enduring classics gathered in this collection, among them Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Turn of the Screw," by Henry James and "The Lurking Fear," by H. P. Lovecraft. Includes Ann Radcliff's touchstone essay, "On the Supernatural in Poetry," which posits the difference between terror and horror, along with brief author biographies.

Table of Contents
Ann Radcliffe, On the Supernatural in Poetry 
Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher 
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, The Haunted and the Haunters; Or, The House and the Brain    
Elizabeth Braddon, At Chrighton Abbey Mary 
Bram Stoker, The Judge’s House 
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall Paper 
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw 
M. R. James, The Mezzotint 
Edith Wharton, Afterward 
Oliver Onions, The Beckoning Fair One 
H. P. Lovecraft, The Lurking Fear

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781733561679
Publisher:	Warbler Classics
Publication date:	08/30/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	390
File size:	463 KB

About the Author

Henry James (1843-1916) is among the greatest novelists in the English language. The brother of the psychologist William James and diarist Alice James, he lived in England for the greater part of his last forty years and became a British subject in 1915. His storytelling is characterized by masterful descriptions of the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters. In addition to his well known novels, which include The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of a Dove, he was interested in long-form short stories. "The Turn of the Screw" (1898), a classic example of what he called the nouvelle, is one of the most celebrated haunted house stories of all time.

Table of Contents

On the Supernatural in Poetry vii
by Ann Radcliffe

The Fall of the House of Usher 1
Edgar Allan Poe

The Haunted and the Haunters; Or, The House and the Brain 22
Edward Bulwer-Lytton

At Chrighton Abbey 49
Mary Elizabeth Braddon

The Judge’s House 82
Bram Stoker

The Yellow Wall Paper 102
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Turn of the Screw 120
Henry James

The Mezzotint 233
M. R. James

Afterward 246
Edith Wharton

The Beckoning Fair One 279
Oliver Onions

The Lurking Fear 349
H. P. Lovecraft

Biographical Notes 370