Jacobean tragedy

[joysilence]

LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY dfordoom)

Recently I’ve become interested in the notion of Jacobean tragedy as a precursor of the gothic. Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, first published in 1607, certainly has affinities with the gothic. There’s the idea of a parent’s guilt visited upon the children, there’s a feeling of characters caught in a web of violence from which they cannot escape, and there’s a truly astonishing amount of murder and mayhem. And the murder committed by poisoning the lips of a skull - you don’t get much more gothic than that. It’s all very overheated and excitable, and highly entertaining.



x-posted

A Haining Anthology

[joysilence]

Here is a little review of the Mammoth Book Of Haunted House Stories, edited by the enduring Peter Haining.

I enjoyed this anthology, which made a pleasant change from some of the collections of purely modern horror that I have been reading lately. Haining has chosen works from the Victorian era through to the present day, kicking off the anthology with arguably the first real haunted house tale, Bulwer-Lytton's The Haunters and The Haunted, and he has also selected many classics by the likes of Sheridan Le Fanu, M R James and Algernon Blackwood. The problem with such classics is that they have been so frequently anthologized that you can't face reading them again, however classic they are, but luckily Haining has also included many rarely-seen tales - I was persuaded to buy the book by the promise of L P Hartley, A E Coppard and H Russell Wakefield material. Nor is post-war and present-day fiction excluded - Stephen King, crime novelist Ruth Rendell and Basil Copper all make an appearance. The book also boasts some obligatory "extras" - in addition to a light-hearted and amiable introduction by Haining (who claims to have lived in a haunted house for years) there is an Appendix of major haunted house novels, and each story is fronted by a flippant introductory pastiche of an estate agent's leaflet about the house in question.

( What I Thought.. )