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People have enjoyed the horror genre for centuries, reveling in the spooky, toe-curling, hair-raising feelings this genre elicits — perfect for Halloween. Whether you’re trick-or-treating, attending a costume party, or staying home, we’ve put together a list of Oxford World’s Classics that will put you in the mood for this eerie night.
“The Vampyre”, a gothic horror that’s sure to push you to the edge of your seat, is considered the first to incorporate a vampire into fiction. And that’s just one of the many squeamish stories in store; from a bloodthirsty vampire to obsessive revenge, let the ghastly atmosphere overwhelm you with this collection of stories.
Follow the terrifying story of a young man whose descent into madness leads into a life as a serial murderer. In the second half of the novel, the murderer tells his side of the story, revealing his true madness. This psychologically unnerving novel will probably leave you sleepless. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
Perhaps a story about an arranged marriage wouldn’t garner the usual horror fan’s interest. But after nearly (and unknowingly) being stabbed by her jealous stepmother, the protagonist escapes from the arrange marriage into the labyrinth of the passages underneath Sicilian castles. With Ann Radcliffe’s weaving of psychological terror in a gothic setting, this is a perfect book to lose yourself in while (perhaps accidentally) ignoring the trick-or-treaters at your door.
In a story highlighting the horrors that humans can wreak upon one another, Marlow (the narrator in the story) tells of his experience in Africa and of his witnessing Kurtz’s descent into power hunger and madness. The dark themes present throughout Heart of Darkness will sit at the forefront of your mind, an ever-present reminder that humans can be just as frightful as any monster.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde poster by Chicago : National Prtg. & Engr. Co. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The first story in this four-piece collection is the horrifying story that tells of a doctor conducting experiments that cause him to transform into a violent, murderous man. Is Hyde really a separate “being”? Or is he simply Jekyll unleashed from the confines of moral society…? This classic story is bound to find its way on the list, and with a number of other chilling short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson in this book, you can’t lose.
You’ll claw your way out of being buried alive in The Room in the Dragon Volant. Or you’ll go mad as a demon haunts you with the intent of destroying you psychologically in Green Tea. With supernatural creatures and nightmarish circumstances, this collection of five short stories will highlight any horror lover’s Halloween.
Headline image: Caw! Caw! Photo by Wayne Wilkinson. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.
I’m mucking around south-central Africa in the year 1873.
I’m navigating my way through the heart of a story that started out as a faux-memoir about a journey into the “heart of darkness.”
Just when I felt sure I had morphed into pure fiction, I meet Dr. David Livingstone. On his deathbed.
David Livingstone, explorer and not-so-evangelical missionary, desperately needs help penning a letter—a response to a dispatch from his patrons in Europe. They have long been worried about his health and now they’re begging him to pack it in.
Give it up! Enough is enough!
Livingstone has been years on the move in search of the source of the Nile. He’s so close he can smell it. And they want him to Come home!
“Tell them,” Livingstone says, “Tell them I’ll go anywhere…as long as it is forward.”
I’ll go anywhere, as long as it is forward.
There’s a mantra for a fictional protagonist.
My journey to Livingstone’s bedside begins with my literary slog up a tributary of the Congo River toward the heart of darkness. This is my work-in-progress, The Writer in Love. At the farthest reaches of this personal essay, the would-be protagonist (me), bogged down in a swamp-forest and despairing of not reaching the heart of his story, realizes he has “run out of geography.”
The protagonist runs out of geography.
I like the sound of that. It suggests the end of the plot within the realms of space and time. The story comes to a stop. Every good story grinds to a halt. Every worthy protagonist travels so far from home that he “runs out of geography.”
And yet the story is far from over. The major issues remain unresolved. So what happens? What happens to the most determined protagonists after their writer has (out of loving compassion) eroded the ground beneath their feet?
The hero moves forward in another realm.
Oh, really? Is that even possible? Does a study of fiction bear that out? More importantly, does it happen for real, in real life?
But it is a real-life story that presents the most compelling evidence of an adventurer running out of geography. Conveniently, the event took place not far beyond the headwaters of the Congo River basin. Only three pages of narrative away—that’s all it takes!—and here I am at Livingstone’s deathbed helping him write that letter.
I’ll go anywhere as long as it is forward.
“Forward” served Livingstone as an article of faith in a vocation rife with disappointments, disillusionments, and dead-ends. It pushed him past the point of no return. It pushed him until he was running on empty, and it kept pushing him until malarial dysentery dissolved his intestines and he could no longer walk. Even then he didn’t want sympathy, didn’t allow his expedition to stop. They carried him until that became unendurable.
Now he lies dying in a daub and wattle hut. There being nothing more he wants from me, it is time to leave him alone.
At the door of the hut I turn to wish him Godspeed or whatever one says to someone about whom it is written* that they will die before dawn. Incredulous, I see that he has mobilized himself off his deathbed to a kneeling position beside his cot. I suppose he’s praying but look again—his palms are open upward. He’s not begging for anything, no, he’s offering. Offering what? What’s he got left?
Livingstone’s credo, like an inner flywheel still spinning, animates him even at death’s door. Forward! But to where? Can you imagine the nature of such a movement?
The Writer in Love is my attempt to explore that movement in fiction.
It is a protagonist’s forward motion in the aftermath of running out of geography that marks him or her as heroic. And if heroic strikes you as grandiose, then I invite you to consider that this everyday miracle (more so than the story’s climax) is what ultimately nourishes a reader.
Rick Blaine nourishes us in Casablanca. Likewise, Charlie Allnut in The African Queen. And the baroness Karen Blixen in Out of Africa. Their plots deliver each of them to the bitter end of who they thought they were. And if the protagonist isn’t exactly dying, he/she wishes they were.
Only now does our investment in their story pay off. The heroic disposition kicks in. Here at the deathbed of David Livingstone I’m seeing it with my own two eyes.
Dr. Livingstone has been beating his way around this African bundu for thirty years in the name of God and the Royal Geographic Society. His mapmaking days are over, he has run out of rivers and waterfalls and mountains. He has run out of time.
And yet as I watch Livingstone on his knees I feel no sadness at all. He may have run out geography but that’s so yesterday. The body is dying, sure, okay, I may even shed a tear for him, but corporeal does death not a tragic story make. Especially not when the protagonist on his deathbed says:
I’ll go anywhere as long as it is forward.
Instinctively a reader understands that the protagonist who empties himself has escaped the prison of his small self.
Look at Livingstone—he is still emptying himself. At the heart of the story, the protagonist discovers it’s the only way to move forward.
We don’t entirely understand how it works or where he’s going. It certainly doesn’t serve a protagonist to know such things. It’s only after the fact that we learn our trajectory was never other than toward this blessed emptiness.
As a wrap up to this piece, I’ll leave you with an account of David Livingstone’s death, as reported by his African lieutenants when his body—minus his heart—was delivered up for transport back to England:
Dr. Livingstone was kneeling by the side of his bed, his body stretched forward, his head buried in his hands upon the pillow. For a minute they watched him: he did not stir, there was no sign of breathing; then one of them, Matthew, advanced softly to him and placed his hands to his cheeks. It was sufficient; life had been extinct some time, and the body was almost cold: Livingstone was dead.*
* from The Last Journals of David Livingstone (1869-1873).
The phrase arrested me as I reread Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Marlow, the English river boat captain, is describing the jungle that surrounds him:
“…there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly…”
I get the chills.
Landscape as literary device—Conrad uses it to characterize Kurtz, the rogue ivory trader, whom Marlow has come upriver to find. Everything up there in the Congo River basin is “monstrous and free”.
Conrad’s novel is a cautionary tale of “uncivilized” freedom. Kurtz has attained god-like status by leaving conventional belief systems far behind. He’s free…and feral. It’s meant to freak us out.
And here I go, now, crawling out on a limb to propose that most satisfying stories direct the protagonist through a story heart that can be described as “monstrous and free”.
For the protagonist, the major crisis presents an existential dilemma that is both frightening and freeing. I’m suggesting this as a way to view every story heart:
The heart of a story is a country both frightening and freeing.
I have no proof that Conrad was trying to tell us the same thing. But here`s a personal story that places “monstrous and free” at the heart of my own story.
It happened in India.
We were seekers experimenting druglessly with altered states. We put our personal identities to the test by asking ourselves:
“WHO AM I?”
Pairing up, sitting nose to nose, taking turns, Who are you? “Well, my name is Reece; I have a B.A. in geography, I’m Canadian, I…my favourite book is, ahh… Heart of Darkness… I… ah…”
Sounds simple enough at first, but it quickly devolves into speculation. Who am I? Easier said than done! Try it. After five minutes, switch. Now, I’m listening non-judgmentally to my partner’s stream of consciousness. Rivers of baloney! Every 40 minutes, find a different partner. Eighteen hours a day for three days.
Day 2 and we are sick to death of our rationalizations, explanations, memories, hopes, dreams and delusions about who we are. Our belief systems are a cover-up for…for what? Something is trying to surface…something overwhelming. We are terrified. People are crying. It’s a madhouse! How can this be happening?
I find myself allowing all that baloney to fall away…
Miraculously, I have no more thoughts about who I’m supposed to be…
I become a lion on the Serengeti Plain.
Did someone say, “MONSTROUS AND FREE”? I have never felt such power. I can see through people.
Nearby herds of zebra and impala are in serious danger, although for the moment they are quite safe. You see, I’m not hungry. Not yet. My sexual appetite (now that I’m a lion, hmmm…) is another issue. I recall being mildly troubled by that. And in the next moment not troubled at all!
(Don’t worry—attendants kept watch over us.)
Power without a conscience, it’s not a safe state—that’s what I’m trying to say.
Freedom can serve the monster…or it may serve a higher cause.
I had the support of my fellow adventurers within an arena of trust to guide me through this jungle. But all the Marlows of the fiction world travel solo into the story heart. Alone, they face the consequences of a monstrous freedom.
Little wonder that readers are so compelled by the fictional protagonist steaming upriver toward the story heart.
I’ve been replaying my favourite novels and movies to see if “monstrous and free” applies to their story hearts. I’ll analyse Casablanca in an upcoming post. In the meantime, here’s a question to ponder:
Do all Marlows dread the story heart?
And if so, why do they dock their boat and step ashore and risk becoming “monstrous and free”?
By: Jerry Beck,
on 10/1/2016
By: Connie Ngo,
on 10/28/2014
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By: PJ Reece,
on 6/30/2014
I’m mucking around south-central Africa in the year 1873.
Livingstone has been years on the move in search of the source of the Nile. He’s so close he can smell it. And they want him to Come home! 
“Monstrous and free”…
We were seekers experimenting druglessly with altered states. We put our personal identities to the test by asking ourselves: