By FireLight: A Guide to Speculative Fiction Before 1900

Those who read by firelight in centuries past left us an embarrassment of riches in stories of ghosts, werewolves, and other spooks, of lost loves and lost worlds, and of the then new world of science. This book, with its one hundred spoiler-free reviews, is your guide to many of those old tales. It offers plot summaries, analyses, not-quite humble opinions, and short author biographies, all told in a lively and engaging style. Beginning with Daniel Defoe's 1705 "The Apparition of Mrs. Veal"-often called the first modern ghost story (it's not)-and ending with John Buchan's 1899 dreamy "The Far Islands," the reader will find informative and thoughtful explorations of both familiar and less well-known works such as John Polidori's "The Vampyre," Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Wilhelm Hauff's "The Severed Hand," and Elizabeth Gaskell's "The Grey Woman." For the reader curious about old-fashioned things going bump in the night, this collection provides an enjoyable directory.