Description:
"Once upon a midnight dreary" is perhaps the best time to peruse the tales of horror and suspense in The Raven and the Monkey's Paw. For a generation raised on the quick-and-gory thrills of Stephen King or Anne Rice, the literary terrors of a previous age such as Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat or Edith Wharton's Afterwards are of a subtler nature. Rest assured, however. Any one of these stories or poems will elevate the hair on the back of your neck. The Victorians, after all, invented the horror genre, and it's no accident that many of their creations, from Bram Stoker's Dracula to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Grey, have provided the inspiration for successive generations of authors as well as numerous filmmakers. The stories and poems in this collection are at the top of their class. Take for instance Ambrose Bierce's "The Boarded Window." Though the story is brief--just a few pages long--when the secret of that window is finally revealed, it's macabre enough to stick in your mind for years, and only gets scarier over time. W.W. Jacobs works similar black magic in "The Monkey's Paw," a cautionary tale about being careful what you wish for. And Charles Dickens himself gets into the act with a ghost story, "The Signalman." Even readers who generally eschew horror will find these elegant tales from the dark side strangely compelling. So latch the windows, ignore the "tapping at your chamber door," and let your blood be curdled by the masters. --Alix Wilber
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