Huh, just learned that Wikisource has a bunch of neat 19th/early twentieth century fiction uploaded there.
In addition to the usual public domain suspects (Frankenstein, Dracula, Carmilla, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a bunch of Lovecraft of mixed quality), there are also a bunch of other stories there which tend to get referenced a lot but arenāt necessarily adapted too often.
So, I thought that Iād link some that Iāve actually read in the past and thought other folk may enjoy.
- The Yellow Wall Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, written after the author suffered a bout of post-partum depression and was prescribed essentially getting locked in an attic room by her husband with āno distractionsā as a means of getting restā¦ The enforced isolation and boredom was most certainly NOT something Perkins Gillman approved of, with her sending a copy of the short story to her doctor to illustrate how terrible it was.
- The Monkeyās Paw by WW Jacobs, Iād imagine that most folk are aware of this one, if only via the parodies in shows like the Simpsons. The premise is simple: elderly British couple get a magic monkeyās paw which grants wishes, only for horrible things to happen to them in response.
- The Willows by Algernon Blackwood, a pair of Englishmen go on a rowing holiday in Eastern Europe. Unfortunately for them, they go into an area that people arenāt meant to travel into, and things get trippy. Blackwood was himself one of several big influences on Lovecraft, although Blackwood own actual interest in the occult sometimes makes his work a littleā¦ esoteric?
- The White People by Arthur Machen, a pair of Edwardian blokes are discussing the nature of magic, when one of them pulls out the diary of a young girl from the North West of England. Within the journal it details her experiences with the supernatural in a creepy, matter of fact way brought about by her nanny essentially indoctrinating her into a magical world from a very young age. What in other stories could be whimiscal becomes deeply creepy when the protagonist is trying to describe what sheās seeing with a childās vocabulary.
- What Was It? A Mystery by Fritz-James OāBrien, in a supposedly haunted guesthouse, one of the residents is set upon by what the initially thought was a ghost, only to discover after beating the crap out of it, that itās some undefinable invisibleā¦ thing. More weird than creepy, but still kind of interesting.
- The Night Wire by HF Arnold, a tale told by a night wire operator, whose job it was to take and record incoming messages by telegraph over the course of the night. This take a turn, when it appears that a living fog begins to creepy into the cityā¦
- The Canal by Everil Worrell, wherein a man falls in love with a woman on a canal boat, only to accident usher in a potential vampire apocalypse. Read this version, itās the better of the two existing versions, the other being an extensively revised version of author/publisher August Derleth which he essentially rewrote to be more stereotypically pulpy.
- Caterpillars by EF Benson, a bloke on holiday in Italy notices an unusual infestation in the hotel heās staying at.
- āOh, Whistle and Iāll Come To You, My Ladā by MR James. An English academic goes on a walking holiday along the Norfolk coast, only to discover a mysterious whistle while hiking. Ignoring basic hygiene, the bloke decides to blow it, leading to a slow, creeping tension as the thing he summoned gets closer and closer over the next few days.
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