Customer Reviews

The Hours After Midnight...: Tales of Terror and the Supernatural

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Le Fanu was an enormously influential writer in his time. It's said that his vampire tale Carmilla inspired Bram Stoker. Later on, two of the 20th century's most heralded ghost story writers, M.R. James and Henry James, were also influenced by Le Fanu's tales.

While Le Fanu was one of the most popular writers of the Victorian era, he's not so widely read today, and most people encounter his work in ghost story anthologies, especially his most famous story, "Green Tea," a masterpiece of the genre. As this anthology demonstrates, Le Fanu's style gradually moved away from the mannered, overwrought Gothic conventions popular in his time toward a more vivid and taut style in his later work.

Le Fanu was a noted recluse who gradually withdrew from society after the death of his wife, and it's said that his work mirrored his tormented inner life. He wrote by candlelight far into the night in his gloomy Georgian house, perhaps attempting to exorcise the nightmares that kept him from sleep. Indeed, many of Le Fanu's tales have a strangely off-kilter psychological quality to them that seems to spring from a deeply morbid nature. In his work there's a shift away from the typical external Gothic terrors to internal sources of dread. He's sometimes compared to Poe, another groundbreaking writer who was a master of mood and psychological suspense.

One anecdote that is often told about Le Fanu is that throughout his life he was beset by a nightmare of being trapped a crumbling mansion on the verge of collapsing about him. When Le Fanu was found dead one February morning, his doctor remarked, "It is as I feared. The house has fallen at last."