Creators: Liked Elizabeth Gaskell's chilling Gothic tales blend the real and the supernatural to eerie, compelling effect. 'Disappearances', inspired by local legends of mysterious vanishings, mixes gossip and fact; 'Lois the Witch', a novella based on an account of the Salem witch hunts, shows how sexual desire and jealousy lead to hysteria; while in 'The Old Nurse's Story' a mysterious child roams the freezing Northumberland moors. Whether darkly surreal, such as 'The Poor Clare', where an evil doppelganger is formed by a woman's bitter curse, or mischievous like 'Curious, if True', a playful reworking of fairy tales, all the stories in this volume form a stark contrast to the social realism of Gaskell's novels, revealing a darker and more unsettling style of writing.
LovedI think Gascal's Gothic tales were all published separately in magazines during her lifetime, but Penguin have a bindup of what they call her Gothic tales which I listened to on audio book a few years ago as well as having read a lot of the stories separately many times. and it's a really great collection with a lot of really wonderful Gothic tales, really wonderful spooky happenings, ghost stories and strange occurrences and murder and disguise and escape.
LikedI have read a handful of the short stories in this over the last couple of years I find that when it comes to short story collections I'm much better off with reading them front to back in one binge go rather than picking them up and now and again because I'm just not going to remember that I don't really remember aside from the fact that I enjoyed some of the stories in this what they were about or anything like that
What made the match, strongest first
Mixed reactions from creators1 review
