Horror: The 100 Best Books Read Online Free PDF Page A

spectacles, which he calls "eyes, fine eyes". He lays out hundreds of glittering samples -- fiery glass lenses like eyes staring back at the horrified Nathanael. He buys a telescope, which he uses to spy on Olimpia. His interest deepens to obsession. Finally Nathanael meets Olimpia at a ball. She plays piano, sings, and dances well, if soullessly, but she hardly speaks. Others at the ball decide that she is either a wooden doll or simpleminded. Nevertheless, Nathanael pursues his fatal obsession. One night as he is paying a visit to give her a ring, he overhears a quarrel between Spalanzani and Coppelius. He walks in to find them ripping Olimpia apart: Spalanzani reclaims the clockwork he constructed, while Coppelius owns her beautiful glass eyes. After a fight, Coppelius departs with the doll -- leaving its glass eyes on the floor. In frustration, Spalanzani picks up the eyes and throws them at Nathanael. Nathanael goes mad, but his fiancelara nurses him back to health. Later they go up to a clock tower to look at the city. Nathanael puts the accursed telescope to his eye, and goes mad once more. He tries to kill Clara, and finally throws himself from the tower. As in a dream, it is never clear whether Coppelius and Coppola are one man or two; are they split in reality, or only in the divided mind of Nathanael? We are never sure what the mysterious alchemical experiment might be, nor what hold Coppelius had over Nathanael's parents. Facts become lost in Nathanael's mad dream, in which we share. And perhaps that is what is most horrifying about this tale -- we dream it ourselves. Hoffmann's mixture of magic and madness is experienced from inside. Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776-1822) was the first Late Romantic writer. His tales profoundly influenced European and American literature, and that most literary of medical arts, psychoanalysis. He was also a composer and conductor, an influential music critic (the first to appreciate J. S. Bach), and a judge. Many of his tales were appropriated for operas and ballets, including Coppelia , The Nutcracker , and Tales of Hoffmann . The Sand-Man theme of heartless automata appears in the film Metropolis and in much modern science fiction. -- JOHN SLADEK
    7: [1817] JANE AUSTEN - Northanger Abbey

    Catherine Morland, a sensitive young girl much given to devouring sentimental Gothic romances of the type popularized by Mrs. Radcliffe, comes to Bath to stay with family friends. In the whirl of society, she meets two sets of duplicitous people -- the parvenu fortune-hunting Thorpes and the more mysterious, romantic Tilneys. Although she soon sees through the Thorpes, she is lured by her fanciful notions of the romantic life to spend some time at Northanger Abbey, the gloomy ancestral home of the Tilneys. Misled by the likes of Necromancer of the Black Forest (1794) and Horrid Mysteries (1796), Catherine comes to see General Tilney as a villain in the Radcliffian sense and suspect that he has murdered his wife, but eventually a more prosaic -- if still ignoble -- motive emerges for his attentions. However, the General's son Henry proves a suitable romantic hero and does finally win Catherine's hand. Written sometime in the 1790s under the title Susan and sold in 1803 (for 10) to a publisher who didn't bother to issue it, Northanger Abbey did not appear in print until a few months after the author's death. It has been adapted for the stage, radio and television several times, most notably as a BBC-TV film with Robert Hardy and Katherine Schlesinger in 1987.
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    At the end of the 1970s, when I was struggling to write the novel that would get me into screenwriting, I scrawled in a notebook in huge capitals: NORMALITY FOR HORROR! DETAIL, RESEARCH, CHARACTER, BACKGROUND. THE ABNORMAL ONLY HAS MEANING WITHIN THE CONTEXT (DETAILED, PROLONGED) OF THE NORMAL. I still believe it. I was reading 'Salem's Lot at the time and it amazed me how Stephen King's astonishing capacity for endless ordinary