Ghost Stories & Supernatural Tales
From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us! — Scots prayer
Well, wouldn’t you rather have advance warning? My father, who was a superb ghost-storyteller, taught me to appreciate and love a good ghost story. I have found ghost stories around the world, from Japan to England and Scotland, from Persia to Argentina. The United States from its colonial days has been good for “hants,” despite Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fear that we were not old enough (he wrote some terrific ones himself).
This page, because my bias and my suddenly remembering a writer who would qualify, will be frequently updated.
Enjoy! Hope you find something to give you the shivers!
The Italian
The Italian
Father Schedoni is enlisted by the imperious Marchesa di Vivaldi to prevent her son from marrying the beautiful Ellena. Schedoni has no scruples in kidnapping Ellena and in undertaking whatever villainy will further his own ends. His menacing presence dominates a gripping tale of love and betrayal, abduction and assassination, and incarceration in the dreadful dungeons of the Inquisition. Uncertainty and doubt lie everywhere, in Radcliffe's last and most unnerving novel.
Ann Radcliffe defined the "terror" genre of writing and helped to establish the Gothic novel, thrilling readers with her mysterious plots and eerie effects. In The Italian she rejects the rational certainties of the Enlightenment for a more ambiguous and unsettling account of what it is to be an individual - particularly a woman - in a culture haunted by history and dominated by institutional power. This new edition includes Radcliffe's important essay "On the Supernatural in Poetry," in which she distinguishes terror writing from horror.