EBOOK
About
Born in 1814, the son of an Anglo-Irish Protestant clergyman, Le Fanu single-handedly created a new kind of fictional ghost story. Gone are the sheeted spooks rattling rusty chains and the peripatetic headless ladies that infest Gothic fiction. In their place Le Fanu created formidably real supernatural presences that emerge from within, as well as invade from without.
Le Fanu was the first writer to explore seriously the psychological dimensions of the ghost story; at the same time he was adept at invoking the physical presence of supernatural malevolence. The world in which his characters move is a hostile one, his stories surrounded by an infinity of outer darkness. Private anguish undoubtedly underlies these public fictions.
And yet Le Fanu's stories - be they of ghosts or tales of mystery - are also of the good old-fashioned type, best enjoyed in the sort of setting he himself described - 'the old-fashioned parlor fire-side and its listening circle of excited faces, and, outside, the wintry blast and the moan of leafless boughs ...
Le Fanu was the first writer to explore seriously the psychological dimensions of the ghost story; at the same time he was adept at invoking the physical presence of supernatural malevolence. The world in which his characters move is a hostile one, his stories surrounded by an infinity of outer darkness. Private anguish undoubtedly underlies these public fictions.
And yet Le Fanu's stories - be they of ghosts or tales of mystery - are also of the good old-fashioned type, best enjoyed in the sort of setting he himself described - 'the old-fashioned parlor fire-side and its listening circle of excited faces, and, outside, the wintry blast and the moan of leafless boughs ...