Vincent Darlage’s Reviews > Mary Shelley Horror Stories > Status Update

Read "The Mortal Immortal," about a man who rushed to conclusions about his love, tried to drink a chemical elixir to remove love from his mind, but actually drank a chemical elixir that made him functionally immortal insofar as aging goes (but can still be killed by other means).

Read "The Transformation," a short Gothic tale about a prideful man who blows his inheritance and is exiled. He meets a dwarven sorcerer, and exchanges bodies with him for three days in trade for a chest of gold. The dwarf reneges on the deal. It's about the consequences of pride and combines a physical transformation with an intellectual one to complete the arc.

Finished "The Spectre-Barber," about a forthright man who goes out to earn his fortune, always is honest, does right by a ghost, and earns a fortune. This is the last of the set of ghost stories Mary Shelley claimed inspired her. Also read "On Ghosts" an 1824 essay by Mary Shelley about the lack of magic in the current world, and she tells a couple of ghost stories some friends related to her.

Read "The Fated Hour" by Friedrich Laun, about a bride whose death was foretold to her father by her sister's spirit.

Read "The Family Portraits," a short story I've wanted to read for a long time. It was mentioned by Mary Shelley in here introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein. It was originally a German tale, but she read the French translation. This of course was an English translation.

This was convoluted at the end in terms of who was related to whom, but it was an effective ghost story.

Finished Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Christabel," a poem of a lesbian vampire. It's unfortunate the poem is unfinished. I liked the scene where Geraldine (the vampire) banishes Christabel's guardian angel (Christabel's dead mother). I thought that whole sequence was powerfully written.

Read "The Vampyre" by John Polidori, the doctor who was with the Shelleys and Lord Byron when Frankenstein was conceived. This story introduced Lord Ruthven, a noble vampire. "The Vampyre" was written in 1819, whereas Dracula was written in 1897. A man travels with a vampire, discovers the evil but is sworn to secrecy for a year, and then the vampire marries & kills the man's sister.

Read "A Fragment" by Lord Byron. Written during the period when Frankenstein was conceived. An interesting start to a story. I wish Byron had finished it.