horror classics | Paula Cappa

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October 27, 2015 · 9:14 am

Romantic Horror: Poe’s Lady Ligeia

Ligeia by Edgar Allan Poe (1839)

Tuesday’s Tale of Terror October 27, 2015

Who doesn’t love a romance with twists of horror? Especially during the Halloween reading season. The opening epigraph of this short story is a reference to the will of death vs. the will to live. In this tale, one of Poe’s less popular ones, our narrator lives in a decaying city near the Rhine. He lives there with the love of his life, Ligeia. She is of the highest beauty and with a gentle soul … “She came and departed as a shadow …sweet voiced …. with the radiance of an opium dream, airy and spirit-lifting.”

Ligeia grows ill and death becomes her. Feeling utterly abandoned, our narrator remarries Lady Rowena and they live in an old abbey … until Rowena grows ill.

“The greater part of the fearful night had worn away, and she who had been dead, once again stirred …”

Poe, a master of prose, writes this story with its own beauty and suspense. At the literal level, there’s a blending of the supernatural with the psychological. For me, I fell I love with the phantasmagoric elements of the story because it arouses an intense horror. Who can resist the fetters of death? You decide, is this a love story or a horror story?

Read Ligeia at Online-Literature.com

http://www.online-literature.com/poe/2126/

Listen to the audio, narrated by Vincent Price on YouTube.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSHhETITtiw

And no Halloween is complete without Poe’s The Raven. Listen to James Earl Jones narrate it here with music and a portfolio of images:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NykmXl24qcc

Images from Wiki Commons and The Illustrated Poe.

Other Reading Web Sites to Visit

Books & Such

Bibliophilica Lovecraft Ezine HorrorAddicts.net

Horror Novel Reviews Hell Horror HorrorPalace

HorrorSociety.com Sirens Call Publications

Monster Librarian Tales to Terrify Spooky Reads

HorrorNews.net HorrorTalk.com

Rob Around Books Sillyverse The Story Reading Ape Blog

For Authors/Writers: The Writer Unboxed

Don’t forget to view the INDEX above of more free Tales of Terror classic authors.

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Filed under dark fantasy, fiction, ghost stories, Halloween, Halloween stories, horror blogs, short stories, short story blogs, supernatural, tales of terror

Tagged as edgar allan poe, horror classics, Ligeia, Paula Cappa, phantasmagoric, romantic thrillers

January 21, 2014 · 7:36 am

House of Dusk and Shadows

The Room in the Tower by E.F. Benson (1912)

Tuesday’s Tale of Terror, January 21, 2014

“Jack will show you your room. I have given you the room in the tower.”

Sound friendly enough? Not in this story. Picture this: you are sixteen years old and a habitual dreamer with mostly pleasant adventures. One night you dream of a house full of shadows with a dark gloomy staircase leading to a tower where “Jack” brings you to your room. The room-in-the-tower nightmare produces a paralyzing fear but of what exactly you cannot identify. And then this nightmare has the power of recurring in your sleep for years as you grow into an adult. And the nightmares grow too, each one becoming more frightening than the first.

Oh but this is only a dream, you say. Just wake up and go on with your life. And so you do … until the elements of the nightmare begin to appear in your waking life. And you actually meet “Jack” who leads you upstairs to the room in the tower.

Out of the dark silence comes the voice …

“Jack will show you your room. I have given you the room in the tower.”

Wow I love stories like this! (My own novel Night Sea Journey, A Tale of the Supernatural is similar in that it deals with the power of nightmares and how the subconscious and the conscious mind can mix it up and become true horror; so this story really spoke to me.) E.F Benson explores the subconscious mind in a most disturbing way in The Room in the Tower. There might be tea on the lawn to lull the dreamer in, but there is also a dreaded silence to say nothing of the odors of decay and inexplicable bloody hands. And most important, the mysterious reality of supernatural dreaming.

English novelist Edward Frederick Benson (Fred to his friends) was a prolific author of ghost stories. He’s not as popular as some of the other authors here at Tales of Terror, but he was good enough to earn high praise from Lovecraft. Lovecraft so admired Benson’s talents, he mentioned several of Benson’s titles in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (IX).If you’ve never experienced the stories of Fred Benson, get upstairs into that Room in the Tower.