30 Occult & Supernatural Masterpieces you Have to Read Before you Die

by Arnold Bennett

This book, newly updated, contains now several HTML tables of contents that will make reading a real pleasure!
The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.

This book contains the following works arranged alphabetically by authors last names

The Abbot's Ghost, or Maurice Treherne's Temptation [Louisa May Alcott]
The Ghost [Arnold Bennett]
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain [Charles Dickens]
The Haunted House [Charles Dickens]
The Lost Stradivarius [John Meade Falkner]
Curious, If True: Strange Tales [Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell]
The Ghost Kings [Henry Rider Haggard]
Carnacki, The Ghost Finder [William Hope Hodgson]
The Ghost Pirates [William Hope Hodgson]
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow [Washington Irving]
The Turn of the Screw [Henry James]
Ghost Stories of an Antiquary [Montague Rhodes James]
A Thin Ghost and Others [Montague Rhodes James]
The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Ghost Stories [Rudyard Kipling]
Madam Crowl's Ghost and the Dead Sexton [Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu]
Schalken the Painter [Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu]
An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street [Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu]
The Haunted Baronet [Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu]
An Authentic Narrative of a Haunted House [Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu]
Ultor De Lacy: A Legend of Cappercullen [Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu]
Laura Silver Bell [Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu]
Wicked Captain Walshawe, Of Wauling [Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu]
The Child That Went With The Fairies [Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu]
The Mystery of the Semi-Detached [Edith Nesbit]
The Ebony Frame [Edith Nesbit]
Man-Size in Marble [Edith Nesbit]
On Ghosts [Mary Shelley]
The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost [H. G. Wells]
The Canterville Ghost [Oscar Wilde]
A Haunted House [Virginia Woolf]

Genres: Horror, Classics

2317 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 5, 2017

About the author

Enoch Arnold Bennett was an English author, best known as a novelist, who wrote prolifically. Between the 1890s and the 1930s he completed 34 novels, seven volumes of short stories, 13 plays (some in collaboration with other writers), and a daily journal totalling more than a million words. He wrote articles and stories for more than 100 newspapers and periodicals, worked in and briefly ran the Ministry of Information during the First World War, and wrote for the cinema in the 1920s. Sales of his books were substantial, and he was the most financially successful British author of his day.
Born into a modest but upwardly mobile family in Hanley, in the Staffordshire Potteries, Bennett was intended by his father, a solicitor, to follow him into the legal profession. Bennett worked for his father before moving to another law firm in London as a clerk at the age of 21. He became assistant editor and then editor of a women's magazine before becoming a full-time author in 1900. Always a devotee of French culture in general and French literature in particular, he moved to Paris in 1903; there the relaxed milieu helped him overcome his intense shyness, particularly with women. He spent ten years in France, marrying a Frenchwoman in 1907. In 1912 he moved back to England. He and his wife separated in 1921, and he spent the last years of his life with a new partner, an English actress. He died in 1931 of typhoid fever, having unwisely drunk tap-water in France.
Many of Bennett's novels and short stories are set in a fictionalised version of the Staffordshire Potteries, which he called The Five Towns. He strongly believed that literature should be accessible to ordinary people and he deplored literary cliques and élites. His books appealed to a wide public and sold in large numbers. For this reason, and for his adherence to realism, writers and supporters of the modernist school, notably Virginia Woolf, belittled him, and his fiction became neglected after his death. During his lifetime his journalistic "self-help" books sold in substantial numbers, and he was also a playwright; he did less well in the theatre than with novels but achieved two considerable successes with Milestones (1912) and The Great Adventure (1913).
Studies by Margaret Drabble (1974), John Carey (1992), and others have led to a re-evaluation of Bennett's work. The finest of his novels, including Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives' Tale (1908), Clayhanger (1910) and Riceyman Steps (1923), are now widely recognised as major works.

Reviews

[Gidget · Rating 5 out of 5]

WONDERFUL COLLECTION

Readers both new to, and familiar with, Victorian/Edwardian Gothic fiction will appreciate a composition, a collection with variety. Esp the selection for J. Sheridan Le Fanu, it's refreshing to read different & better stories by known authors. READ a taste from those who cultivated the influence still inspiring this genre.

[Zama Sama · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of the stories were really good.