GOTHIC HORRORS - Bowen's Greatest Occult & Supernatural Tales (Annotated): Enriched Edition. Occult horror and supernatural intrigue in 19th-century England's darkest drawing rooms

by Marjorie Bowen

GOTHIC HORRORS - Bowen's Greatest Occult & Supernatural Tales gathers Marjorie Bowen's most atmospheric excursions into the uncanny, where haunted houses, ancestral guilt, occult survivals, and morbid passions disturb the boundaries between history and nightmare. Written in a richly textured, often antiquarian style, these tales belong to the late Gothic tradition while anticipating modern psychological terror arises not merely from apparitions, but from obsession, repression, and the persistence of the past within decaying rooms and troubled minds. Marjorie Bowen, the principal pseudonym of Gabrielle Margaret Vere Campbell Long, was a prolific British writer whose historical fiction and supernatural tales reveal an exceptional command of period detail and emotional intensity. Her fascination with dynastic corruption, religious anxiety, and fatal inheritance shaped her darker work, while her own early struggles as a professional woman writer may be felt in her acute portrayals of constraint, secrecy, and haunted interior lives. This volume is recommended for readers of classic ghost stories, Gothic fiction, and literary horror who value elegance as much as fear. Bowen's tales reward close reading, offering not only spectral suspense but also a sophisticated meditation on memory, sin, and historical unease.

This enriched edition has been carefully crafted to add value to your reading experience.
- A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions.
- A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation.
- A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists.
- A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths.
- Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts.
- Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.

Genres: Horror

807 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 7, 2018

About the author

Marjorie Bowen (pseudonym of Mrs Gabrielle Margaret V[ere] Long née Campbell), was a British author who wrote historical romances, supernatural horror stories, popular history and biography. Her total output numbers over 150 volumes with the bulk of her work under the 'Bowen' pseudonym. She also wrote under the names Joseph Shearing, George R. Preedy, John Winch, Robert Paye, and Margaret Campbell. As Joseph Shearing, she wrote several sinister gothic romances full of terror and mystery. Many of these stories were published as Berkley Medallion Books. Several of her books were adapted as films. Her books are much sought after by aficionados of gothic horror and received praise from critics.

Bowen's alcoholic father left the family at an early age and was eventually found dead on a London street. After this, Bowen's prolific writings were the chief financial support for her family. She was married twice: first, from 1912-16, to a Sicilian named Zefferino Emilio Constanza, who died of tuberculosis, and then to one Arthur L. Long. Her first novel was The Viper of Milan (1906), after which she produced a steady stream of writings until the day of her death on 23rd December 1952. Her last, posthumous, novel was The Man with the Scales (1954).

Reviews

[Derek Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Horror stories fall mostly into two forms. In one, the horror is perpetrated by the Other – an often hideous, slimy dweller from distant or unknowable regions driven by unrelenting cruelty and hatred of humanity. It includes those pointlessly nasty ghosts who resent the living for being alive.
In the other approach, the horror dwells Within, an emanation from or reflection of the basic hideousness of a human soul. Bowen is one of the best of these writers, which, in my fading adulthood I find far more horrifying that the boogeyman of my childhood. She is also a master (mistress) of misdirection, especially of ephemeral confusion, which remains once her tale is complete – a crawling attenuation of eeriness.
This collection includes one novel, "Black Magic," and some superb visits to the deepest regions of human degradation. Like The Shadow, Bowen knows "what evil lurks in the hearts of men" – and women. She is convincing because she so well illuminates the truth of the disordered mind. She is also a superb stylist, with her special wickedness directed at the empty arrogance of the powerful who use the world as their dinner plate.
Bowen was intrigued by Italian history, and several of the stories take place in 16th or 17th century Italy, during or surrounding the time of the Medici. "Black Magic" shifts its direction as it moves along, but returns from each side journey to a central focus on Dirk, a young sculptor and would-be disciple of the devil, and Theirry, drawn to, yet often repulsed by, Dirk's darkness. Their adventure starts in Flanders, ends in Rome, traversing major religious and political upheavals (and sordid deaths) over roughly a decade. The story seems to lean, at first, toward a highly unusual look at gay attraction for the time it was written (1909), but unfolds into something far more intricate and convoluted. At many turns, Bowen seems to prefigure the ending, yet it's not clear if she intends to do so or if her approach was so unusual at that time that finish would still have caught the reader unaware.
But it's the shorter pieces that remain with me most solidly, three especially. "Petronilla of the Laurel Trees," telling of two young hopeful lovers tied (willingly) to the genealogical ambitions of an old man, is as deeply sad a tale as I've ever read, because their downfall is the result of that noble yet misdirected willingness. There's no evil here, beyond that of life's unfolding.
"The Sign-Painter and the Crystal Fishes" leaves both life and death in their unfinished states, to the point where it's not clear where one leaves off and the other begins, or which comes first. The characters are all victims, all perpetrators. The story is superbly balanced, it's sense of incompleteness maybe its strongest point.
But "Scoured Silk," which I first read in general horror collection – in fact, the story that made me hunt down Bowen, whom I'd never read before – will live with me for through my life. It is horrific at the most basic level because, though its evil is numbing, it is believable, almost a solidification of of the worst we could imagine of a malicious obsession with vengeance. It's a story I would not dare outline, but one I recommend without restraint – so horrendous in its telling I could not read it a second time here. And perhaps never again. It's already inside me.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.89⭐

Black Magic 5⭐
The Housekeeper 5⭐
Scoured Silk 5⭐
The Extraordinary Adventure of Mr. John Proudie 5⭐
The Burning of the Vanities 3.5⭐
The Extraordinary Adventure of Grace Endicott 3.25⭐
A Poor Spanish Lodging 3.5⭐
Twilight 3⭐
Giuditta's Wedding Night 4⭐
Petronilla of the Laurel Trees 2.75⭐
The Fair Hair of Ambrosine 5⭐
The Sign-Painter and the Crystal Fishes 3⭐
Brent's Folly 2.5⭐