Haunted House Fiction

For Halloween, why not read some creepy tales? The Guardian takes note of some spooky haunted house fiction, here.

From the piece...

The classic haunted house story – whether or not the malevolence of the house, flat, garden or bathroom is later "explained" by a forgotten grisly suicide, murder most foul or Satanist conclave scribbling pentagrams on the floor – may seem a bit on the old-fashioned side. After all, it was Baron Bulwer-Lytton, of "dark and stormy night" infamy, who kicked off the sub-genre in 1857 with "The Haunters and the Haunted", in which a curious gentleman spends a night in a diabolical house with a sturdy servant and a prize bull-terrier. (This story has remained with me, both because of the house's pervasive eerie chill – "I felt an exceedingly cold air pass by my cheek, like a sudden draught ..." – and because the poor dog winds up having its neck wrung. It stands up surprisingly well to rereading, although I prefer the reasons for a house's hauntedness to remain a little more shrouded in mystery than Bulwer-Lytton eventually allows.) It's certainly true that most of my favourite haunted house stories were written in the Victorian and Edwardian periods – MR James produced several, including an intoxicatingly horrible haunted house in miniature, as did Sheridan LeFanu and Charles Dickens.

Also in the Guardian, Kate Mosse offers up her Top Ten Ghost Stories.