Misery, fear, despa A collection of short stories and poems resurrect the spirit of the Gothic Blue Book. Misery, fear, despair, regret and dread are highlighted in the following pages, stirring old ghosts, witches, and awakening death. The following collection of new and established horror authors weave together brilliant tales of terror celebrating the history of the Gothic story with a new twist. Hanson - The Squatter K.
New Horror Stories once a month featuring an established or emerging horror writer
P Maxwell Cover Art: Published first published October 10th To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Gothic Blue Book , please sign up. Lists with This Book. Jul 07, David Watson rated it it was amazing. This is a collection of 12 short horror stories and two poems edited by Cynthia and Gerardo Pelayo. This anthology honors the gothic story and includes old ghost stories and tales of misery, fear, despair, regret and dread.
Bluebooks and Gothic Chapbooks [Part I]
This collection would make Edgar Allan Poe proud. The Haunted Edition is a tribute to the Gothic blue Books that came out in the late 18th and 19th century. These books included several short stories and were between 36 and 72 pages long.
They were very cheap and not well liked by literary critics; despite that they were very popular. The first story is a poem which sets the mood for the whole book. It describes the emotional state of a woman who has just found out her husband is cheating on her. The depressed woman is walking on a beach and sees a very familiar looking woman in an abandoned beach house. Another good story in this anthology was The Tapping by John Everson. This story was the kind of story I love to read as a horror fan. Three men in an old graveyard digging up corpses on a windy cold Halloween night in an attempt to scare a co worker.
What can be more fun than that and of course nothing can go wrong when you disturb the dead.
Some other good stories in this collection include The Realtor, which tells the tale of a salesman trying to make a quota by creating a few urban legend. Both are great ghost stories with very different moods and endings. When she finds out that someone has been using her, she decides to get her revenge by reenacting a death scene which is a tribute to a very famous horror author.
Gothic Blue Book: The Haunted Edition by Cynthia Pelayo and Gerardo Pelayo
Feb 08, Barbie rated it really liked it. I like this collection of short stories.
Jul 29, K. Smith rated it liked it. I would have given it 2. There are a few good stories, most of the rest are just OK. In my opinion, you can skip "Attic". Remember, Gerardo and Cina rated it 5 stars, and that bumps the rating up, but it's their book and they wrote a couple o I would have given it 2. Remember, Gerardo and Cina rated it 5 stars, and that bumps the rating up, but it's their book and they wrote a couple of the stories.
Do the changes represent an authorial anticipation that an audience of lower socio-economic standing are more interested in a fast-paced plot than the subtleties of the sublime, or do they perhaps reveal a change in popular taste? Of course, when it comes to terror size really doesn't matter. From the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe and M. Wilkinson was a prolific writer whose literary output ranged from translation work to novels and books for children as she struggled to live by her pen.
Montville is thought to be one of her earliest attempts at writing in the genre and is packed with Gothic motifs. Despite needing to draw out a family tree of character relationships to make sense of it, this text and the other bluebooks we read in class provide an interesting, valuable and untapped source for Gothic Studies. Fast forward two centuries and the question is whether readers today would actually prefer a one sitting story they can flick through on the commute rather than having to invest emotional and intellectual commitment to the slow reveal of a lengthy tome?
She has published on both the Romantic and the Contemporary Gothic and is an active member of the International Gothic Association. She also runs the Gothic Reading Group at Lehigh and has been a long-time blogger for http: Modern readers and scholars of the Gothic are accustomed to reading books of great length: This trait applies to many Romantic-era novels, but the Gothic seems to use its overabundance of pages in order to confront the reader with not one story or even two stories, but an extensive web of many stories and framing narratives, creating a text that feels even longer than its odd page length.
What is, of course, important to remember is that these novels are broken up into volumes, which would have been read individually and often out of order, so that these narratives within novels could often stand on their own tucked within the larger plot of the novel.
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And, somehow, these individual narratives always become somewhat related, even important, to that central plot, creating an expansive, complex tome. These are the Gothic texts we read and write about today, popular enough to have survived and to be republished. But, what I want to discuss in this post is another type of Gothic text, even more popular than Gothic novels: Rather than pages, they ranged from a mere thirty-six to seventy-two pages, often tackling a highly-concentrated version of a novel-sized plot within that small number.
Their small size and cheap materials also meant that they were much more economical, and, marketed purely as entertainment, they were considered far inferior to their counterpart novels, texts already facing a steady dose of criticism. Even today, they rarely enter into discussions of the Gothic, despite their key role in perpetuating the tradition. Though the most prolific period for the production of original Gothic fiction is commonly considered to be the s, chapbooks extended the lives of these novels through various levels of plagiarism and recycled tropes that were published through the early part of the nineteenth century until they morphed into other periodical formats.
While I have merely made a small dent in the vast array of texts available, I will use the remainder of this post to point out some of the common traits of these Gothic tales in miniature.
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The Gothic has often been criticized for being a plot-driven form of literature, and I will not dispute that this is not so. Yet, within the pages of The Mysteries of Udolpho lie rich descriptions of settings, characters, philosophies, dialogue, and actions that do not immediately move the plot along. These details give a vivid sense of time, place, and character, allowing the reader to enter into the finely-crafted world of the narrative.
Gothic Blue Book: The Haunted Edition
Bluebooks strip away all this extraneous description; rather than creating a world, the bluebook creates a series of events. Every detail immediately connects to some sort of action or plot point. A character who may seem to be a passerby in the beginning will surely return as the masked villain or enigmatic patron at the end. This means that every word in a chapbook is instrumental to its cohesive narrative. This focus on plot not only excludes character development and descriptions that forefront the beauty of language, but also elements like comic relief, which do nothing to further the action.
Even the suspense of terror often falls by the wayside because it takes too long to develop, whereas horror exists in plenty for its ability to create an immediate effect via a quick sensationalized description of the grotesque, abject, or macabre: University of VA Library. In some of the most extreme cases, titles could resemble this chapbook: This example provides a strict outline of events, but not all titles were so forthcoming.
Most titles simply included two short parts, such as Castle of St. Bernard; Or, the Captive of the Watch Tower Potential buyers could look for keywords that would indicate that the tale would be of their liking: While reading dozens of these short texts in the archive, I found that it was impossible to summarize the events: