San Antonio College Library

Great modern American supernaturalist brilliantly surveys history of genre to 1930s, summarizing, evaluating scores of books, including works by Poe, Bierce, M.R. James, "Monk" Lewis, many others. Praised by critics as diverse as Edmund Wilson and Vincent Starrett. New introduction by E.F. Bleiler [from publisher's description].

In his Preface to The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature, James Twitchell writes that he is not interested in the current generation of vampires, which he finds "rude, boring and hopelessly adolescent. However, they have not always been this way. In fact, a century ago they were often quite sophisticated, used by artists varied as Blake, Poe, Coleridge, the Brontes, Shelley, and Keats, to explain aspects of interpersonal relations....

Are ghosts, vampires, and other forms of "haunted presence" related to universal religious instincts? Are emotions that play a part in religious ritual and narrative similar to those in classical works of Gothic fiction such as Dracula, Frankenstein, The Turn of the Screw, and the tales of Edgar Allan Poe? Haunted Presence: The Numinous in Gothic Fiction reveals the intersection of Gothic literature and contemporary theories about the psychology of...

To explain the millennial shift away from the traditionally dark Protestant post-Enlightenment Gothic, Nelson studies the complex arena of contemporary Gothic subgenres that take the form of novels, films, and graphic novels. She considers the work of Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer, graphic novelists Mike Mignola and Garth Ennis, Christian writer William P. Young (author of The Shack), and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. She considers twentieth-century...