2011 February

Presented as the posthumous papers of an occult doctor, these five gothic horror tales range from the story of a clergyman haunted by a demon in monkey form to Carmilla, the female vampire tale that was a major influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Le Fanu’s claustrophobic thriller tells the story of Maud Ruthyn, a teenaged heiress sent to live with her mysterious uncle after her father’s death only to discover that her life is in danger.

After years of struggling to make ends meet on a bleak New England farm and living with a wife he doesn’t love, Ethan Frome falls for his wife’s cousin Mattie. But his new romance ends in tragedy.

Isolated from the man she loves and confined to the Castle of Udolpho, Emily St Aubert faces a struggle to keep her sanity as threats real and imagined weigh down upon her in this gothic classic.

Steeped in social realism, George Eliot’s Adam Bede is a tale of tragedy, hope, love and redemption in rural England at the start of the 19th century.

Lord Byron’s epic and dramatic poem turns the legend of the Spanish rogue Don Juan on its head, transforming him from philanderer to a man easily seduced by women. In doing so Byron turns Don Juan into the ultimate Byronic hero.

Ruthless and hungry for knowledge, Caliph Vathek renounces Islam and begins committing a series of deplorable acts in order to gain supernatural powers. But his search ends in his own damnation.

HP Lovecraft called The Willows, Blackwood’s eerie tale of a canoe trip along the Danube, the finest supernatural tale in English literature. In this collection, it is joined by a further nine of the author’s ghost stories.

In this comic reworking of the Greek myth of Pygmalion, a Victorian phonetics professor sets out to teach a poverty stricken flower girl to pass as a duchess.

Presented as a series of short stories narrated by newspaper reporter George Willard, Winesburg, Ohio depicts the dark underbelly of life in an isolated small town.