Two tales from the golden age of supernatural fiction
The Haunted House at Latchford by Mrs. J. H. Riddell
Mrs. J. H. Riddell excelled at blending the realistic and supernatural elements in her stories. In Essex she found the right dreary setting for The Haunted House at Latchford, “where beyond the fated house and ruined garden lay the belt of pine trees and the lake of the dismal swamp, which had furnished Crow Hall with no less than two tragedies.”
The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins
Like Edgar Allan Poe before him and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle after, Wilkie Collins shifted easily from rational domains to the “superrational.” The Haunted Hotel exhibits the same relentless pace and narrative power, the same attention to plot and backdrop detail that distinguish The Moonstone and The Woman in White, along with the obsession with destiny and the willful struggle against it. Collins’s much-loved Venice provides the scenery and fatal beauty, the grim waterways and palaces the author will haunt with mysterious women, grotesques, and bloody conspiracies.
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