First published in Playboy at the end of the 1950s, this is a tale of enormous originality that remains, at the same time, a grand homage and a reinvention of the Gothic. To the eyes of its seemingly straight protagonist, Sir Robert Cargrave, everything in Castle Csejthe is askew and in decay. He has been called there to assist the husband of a former liaison of his—the man in question, the preternaturally pale Mr. Sardonicus, has the lower half of his face paralyzed in a horrid rictus, and the reason for this is too preposterous and delightful to consign in these few lines!

In my opinion, Ray Russell is the literary equivalent of the Italian filmmaker Mario Bava, a supersaturated neo-Gothicist who shines above the premises of his material based on style, conviction, and artistic flair. Sadly, most of Russell’s work has remained unavailable, except for outrageously overpriced paperbacks and expensive collectors’ editions. It is therefore that I take great pride in presenting a new edition of Haunted Castles: The Complete Gothic Stories as part of this Penguin Horror series.

And this brings us to the final title of the series, S. T. Joshi’s edited volume of American Supernatural Tales.

Foremost among the modern scholars of the genre, Mr. Joshi has published many volumes dedicated to the study of the weird tale and has edited many volumes of horror fiction with unparalleled rigor and love. In every respect, he will be a more adept guide than I in taking you hand in hand through the amazing catalog of supernatural fiction he has curated.

So, there you have it. We have prepared a small collection of books that I hope will find their way into the hands of young, strange readers—like I was—curious about this deranged form of storytelling—seeking that late-night chill, that intimate shiver that happens when the lamia crosses the threshold of our room and whispers at us from the darkened corner.

When the certainty of seeing a monstrous thing takes ahold of us and forces us to gaze at the end of a corridor—there, an apparition stands, a thing of supreme horror. And, as we advance toward it—as in HPL’s “The Outsider”—we are overwhelmed by the realization that the putrid flesh, the vacant eyes, the mad stare we see in that lonely figure is nothing but the reflection in a mirror. A dark mirror facing us.

May your nightmares be plentiful.

GUILLERMO DEL TORO
Thousand Oaks, California, 2013

INTRODUCTION

The work of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) revolutionized and transformed supernatural and psychological horror fiction in so profound and multifaceted a way that it could plausibly be maintained that these genres, as serious contributions to literature, only began with him. The keenness with which Poe analyzed the psychology of fear; the transcendent artistry of his tales, from construction to prose rhythm to aesthetic focus; the intense emotive power of his principal narratives—these and other elements make his work not merely the essential foundation of horror literature but, in many ways, the pinnacle of the genre right up to the present day.

Poe emerged at a critical moment in the history of horror fiction. In the several generations before he began writing, Anglo-American literature had been dominated by the so-called Gothic novel, which had been initiated when Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto from his own press on Christmas day 1764. This outlandish and implausible work of supernatural terror perfectly captured the rejection of eighteenth-century classicism represented by Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. With a healthy infusion of German Romanticism, it spawned a literary legacy whose pinnacles were such works as Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Matthew Gregory Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820).

Gothic novels, of course, were not in any sense uniform in theme and focus, ranging from pure historical novels to tales of rapid action and adventure, to say nothing of such oddities as William Beckford’s Arabian tale Vathek (1786) and Mary Shelley’s proto–science fiction novel Frankenstein (1818). But many of the four hundred Gothic novels of the period shared certain common features, among them a medieval setting (because it was believed that the superstition that pervaded this period fostered the credibility of supernatural manifestations); the “woman in peril” motif; the Gothic castle, with its hidden rooms and secret chambers; and a dominant male personality, whose Faustian quest—whether it be for all-encompassing knowledge or for the acquisition of wealth and power—served to render him the chief villain of the narrative. Pacts with the devil were common, and ghostly manifestations were not infrequent.

It is not certain how much Gothic fiction Poe read, but the sum total of his remarks—in reviews, essays, letters, and even stories—make it clear that he, like others of his time, regarded the Gothic novel as utterly passé. Poe recognized early on that fear—especially fear of the supernatural—is a fleeting emotion, difficult or impossible to sustain over the length of a novel. Accordingly, he turned his attention to embodying fear within the parameters of the short story.

It has long been acknowledged that Poe is the virtual inventor of the short story as we know it; but of course short stories had been written before Poe. In the United States he had been preceded by Washington Irving, whose Tales of a Traveller (1824) and other volumes contained liberal doses of weirdness. Poe himself read the occasional weird tales that were published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a periodical founded in 1817. When he wrote his first short stories in the early 1830s, he may well have used the stories in Blackwood’s as examples. His “Metzengerstein” is little more than a compact little Gothic tale, complete with a castle, a supernatural horse, and other related motifs.

But Poe remains a critical figure in the development of the short story in his emphasis on what he called the “unity of effect.” By this he meant that a story should focus on a single basic incident, and that every scene, every paragraph, even every single word of the tale must contribute directly or indirectly to the final outcome. Poe himself practiced what he preached brilliantly, producing a succession of tales of unparalleled concision, focus, and cumulative power.

Why did Poe write tales of horror and the supernatural? No definitive answer can be given to this question; the fact remains that he was attracted to the weird and bizarre for the whole of his career, even when writing tales that were ostensibly comic or parodic. Poe did little theorizing on the nature of weird fiction, but a single sentence in the preface to his landmark collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), is worth citing. Poe had taken umbrage when some critics claimed that his tales were merely copies of German models, and he threw down this gauntlet: “If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.” By this Poe meant that he would focus on the effects of fear upon human psychology rather than on the mechanical stage properties of an outworn Gothicism.

The result is an unprecedented array of supernatural fiction that laid the groundwork for much of the work that followed in this genre: psychic possession in “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”; supernatural revenge in “The Black Cat”; the weirdness of remote places in “MS. Found in a Bottle” and “A Descent into the Maelström”; the dangers of untrammeled science in “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” Other tales tread the nebulous borderline between life and death in a haunting, incantatory language that—as in “Shadow—A Parable” and “The Masque of the Red Death”—is as much poetry as prose.

Psychological horror—the horror inherent in aberrant human behavior—seems to have been even closer to his temperament.