Haunted castles, dark passageways, witches, ghouls and black cats galore; they're all here, and Richard Dalby treads a cautious path from Charles R. Maturin's Leixlip Castle, a tale of hags and handsome young bridegrooms, through such genuinely creepy examples of the genre as F. Marion Crawford's The Dead Smile and Bram Stoker's The Secret of the Growing Gold, to Gerald Durrell's fanciful reworking of the Dracula story, The Entrance. As a collection, it is as varied as Gothic can get, and guaranteed to bring up the goosebumps.
