Collection · Curated by Alice
Classic horror, from the Gothic to Lovecraft
- 24
- books to download
- 1818–1937
- 119 years apart
- PDF & EPUB
- free, no sign-up
Horror did not arrive fully formed. It was assembled over a century by writers who kept borrowing from each other: the Gothic castle became the haunted house, the ghost became the double, and the double eventually became something with no human shape at all.
This collection follows that line. It starts with Frankenstein (1818), the book that gave the genre its central question — what happens when a man makes something he cannot control — and runs through Poe, who compressed dread into a handful of pages; Wilkie Collins and Sheridan Le Fanu, who moved the terror indoors; Stevenson and Wilde, who put it inside the protagonist; Stoker, who codified the vampire; and Lovecraft, who removed humanity from the centre of the universe altogether.
If you want to see the whole shape of the genre in one sitting, the short pieces are the place to start: The Tell-Tale Heart is eight pages, The Masque of the Red Death nine, The Fall of the House of Usher twenty-one. Every title here is public domain in the United States and free to download in PDF and EPUB.
Frankenstein
On Ghosts
The King in Yellow
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
The Masque of the Red Death
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Dunwich Horror
The Shunned House
Dracula
The Woman in White
At the Mountains of Madness
The Haunted Hotel: A Mystery of Modern Venice
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
In Search of the Unknown
The Phantom of the Opera
The Night Land
The Fall of the House of Usher
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
The Vampire Maid
The Call of Cthulhu
The Turn of the Screw
The House of the Seven Gables
The Tell-Tale Heart