Yesterday’s Horrors

While thinking about horror stories for a forthcoming post, I stumbled upon the Gaslight Archive, a repository for out-of-copyright stories “from the genres of mystery, adventure and the Weird”. (There’s also a discussion list attached, but it appears to be defunct.) The archive includes Charles Dickens’s “The Signal-Man” (1866), Thomas Hardy’s “The Three Strangers” (1903), Robert Hichens’s “How Love Came To Professor Guildea” (1900), E T A Hoffman’s “The Sandman” (1818), W W Jacobs’s “The Monkey’s Paw” (1902), and Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost” (1887) – all of which are terrific. (Full list.) There’s also Lovecraft’s seminal study “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927) – and, elsewhere on the web, Robert W Chambers’s “The Yellow Sign” (1895), Lucy Clifford’s “The New Mother” (1882) and Oliver Onions’s “The Beckoning Fair One” (1911). You could also read Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” (1843), but I’m a fan of the free podcast reading Mitch Benn made of it last year.

(I’m hoping that the horror post will follow at the weekend, but I have to finish my Locus column first to avoid Charles and Liza sending their unstoppable killer robots after me. Again.)