I've already recommend the Phantasmagoria on another thread.

Macbeth as a play is quite the horror trip, and very easy to relate to for modern audiences. There is alot of folklore about the play and it's supposed bad luck for theatres putting it on if they aren't careful (such as trying not to refer to the play by name, but as "The Scottish Play"). It is a play though and not a novel, and a relatively fast read. It's got witches, ghosts and madness as plot points.

Some other fantastique Shakespeare plays are A Midsummer's Night Dream (a romantic comedy involving humans and fairies) and The Tempest (a magician washed onshore an island who has a chance to right a number of wrongs when a ship from the town he was exiled from washes ashore - tons of magic use in this one).

I like some of Nathanial Hawthorn's horror tales, like Young Goodman Brown, but I don't know if I've read them all.

I never got the feeling that Poe's tales were for children; they are mannered and fairly old fashioned by today's standards to be sure though. Another interesting read by Poe is his cosmological work Eureka, in which he explains the universe and it's working through his imagination.

Varney the Vampire is a long, hard slog but perhaps worth it - I couldn't finish more than a few of it's pages. The art is pretty cool though, and if the library's copy ever returns I'll give it another shot.

Recommendations: Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is a favorite horror tale that unfolds like a verbal narrative, and is open to interpretation about the supernatural menace, but I sure dig it.

The Arabian Nights are a very long book of shorts stories and other artifacts (I think there are occasional poems and the like) are an impressive look at older stories of the fantastique, as are Grimms Fairy Tales. In both cases, try to find full translations to retain the fill impact - there's nothing like reading about Cinderella's sisters cutting off parts of their feet to get it to fit into the slipper, or the other various gory bits cut out.

The Illiad and The Odyssey by Homer are fantastic tales that involve horrific elements. Hesiod's Theogony & Works and Days are great ancient sources for other mythic stories in western culture, with plenty of stories you'll remember from elementary school. I also had a post about one of the earliest ghost stories on record from Phlegon's Book of Marvels, which was kind of a "Ripley's Believe It Or Not" of the ancient world, and is worth tracking down.

http://monsterkidclassichorrorforum.yuku.com/topic/32793/t/Philannion-Ancient-Greek-Ghost-Vampire.html

And you can't got wrong with Beowulf - carnage and adventure awaits!

Last Edited By: Dr Acula Jan 13 11 11:19 PM. Edited 1 times.