From the vast frozen regions of the Arctic Circle to the deserts of Australia, and from royal palaces and aristocratic estates to the humblest villages, the souls of the dead—refusing to accept the death of the bodies they once inhabited—return to seek vengeance upon the living, to drag loved ones into the grave with them, or simply to draw upon the warmth of true existence.
These are ghost stories from the Victorian era, a period in which ancient beliefs clashed with rationalism and science, and death exerted a strange, morbid fascination over the living.
The short stories in this volume have been selected as representative of the Victorian period, aiming to evoke not only the essential shiver of fear in the reader, but also an interest in an era that is at once so close to and so distant from our own.
Most of them have never before been translated into Greek.
Victorian ghost stories differ from the purely Gothic novel in that most combine the supernatural with the cold rationalism that was beginning to prevail in the West. The protagonists are no longer cursed heirs of aristocratic families, but well-traveled members of the bourgeoisie who confront the supernatural with the same composure—and the same skepticism—with which they faced the onset of a new era—at least until it reveals itself in all its macabre grandeur.
The collection includes the following stories:
Sheridan Le Fanu: The Tenant’s Story of the Landowner Toby
Arthur Conan Doyle: The Captain of the “Polar Star”
Hume Nisbet: The Haunted Farmhouse
Richard Middleton: The Ghost Ship
Prosper Mérimée: The Vision of Charles XI
Perceval Landon: The Abbey of Therneley
