Horror: The 100 Best Books Read Online Free PDF

details enabled him to make such a huge success out of what was an almost indecently ancient vampire plot. It was obvious that when the man adapted the technique to a really good plot he would produce a classic and he did it with The Shining . Almost by definition horror needs rules, because it thrives on the breaking of rules. It needs a sharp sense of everyday reality so that when the lights go off you really take notice. This is why so many of the greatest horror writers have made a detour into the genre from other kinds of writing and perhaps the most distinguished recruit of all was Jane Austen. No writer in literary history observed the rules and regulations of polite society as acutely as Austen, so it's not surprising that she was also the first writer to see the subversive potential in horror fiction. She deliberately plotted Northanger Abbey so that the notions of Gothic horror fiction and of civilized society come into direct collision. Her heroine Catherine Morland is a horror fan whose imagination keeps running away with her. She sees the most innocuous Sunday afternoon walk as a potential abduction, laundry lists become secret manuscripts, country houses turn into Gothic castles. Austen milks the suspense and the humour to superb effect, but then steers the book to a point where Catherine's horrific perception is truer than anyone else's. "In suspecting General Tilney of either murdering or shutting up his wife", she concludes, "Catherine had scarcely sinned against his character or magnified his cruelty." Northanger Abbey is often portrayed wrongly as a spoof. It obviously gave Austen a lot of fun but it was nothing of the kind. Not only does the author step out of the novel to deliver a ringing endorsement of Gothic fiction, but all the book's humour, all its thrills, all its truth comes from the Gothic world's conquest of the everyday. Women may not regularly be abducted to ruined abbeys by villains in black cowls but Austen is intent on showing us just how well that metaphor conveys the emotional cruelty of polite society. The Gothic perception wins. -- DAVID PIRIE
    8: [1818] MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY - Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus

    In the Arctic, Captain Walton, an English explorer, takes aboard ship a manic young man, Victor Frankenstein, who recounts the circumstances that have brought him to the ends of the earth. Frankenstein tells of his experiments with the creation of life, and his construction of a huge, manlike creature whose repulsive aspect leads his creator to reject him. The Monster later returns to Frankenstein and tells of his sufferings at the hands of humanity and begs the scientist to make him a mate to ease his loneliness. Frankenstein agrees but abandons the project in horror, and the Monster retaliates by murdering his maker's friends and family. Frankenstein pursues the Monster north, but dies on the ship after his story is finished. The Monster pays his last respects and then vanishes into the wastes. Frankenstein is at once a Gothic horror tale and the first important science fiction novel. Its sustained popularity and place in modern myth is probably as much due to the innumerable stage, film, television, comic book and radio adaptations of it -- most of which depart completely from the text -- as to the strengths of the work itself.
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    Subtitled The Modern Prometheus , Mary Shelley's masterwork is a remarkable book. Blending as it does allegory with Gothic elements, storytelling with philosophy, it is all the more remarkable because Mary Shelley completed it before her 20th birthday. Stated bluntly, this "pseudoscientific novel", as it has been called, is about a scientist usurping nature and God's creative powers, and the terrible consequences that follow that act. Written as a gloss on or as a rejoinder to Milton's Paradise Lost , the book is full of grotesque, dreamlike imagery, and the wild chase across the Arctic that ends the novel is a phantasmagoric journey