Secret agent and bionic werewolf Val West is back in Wade Walker’s latest novel Operation Frankenstein. This novel is the second installment in the Code Name: LoneWolf series and the sequel to Bite of the Wolf, which I previously reviewed here. In the last novel, West was bitten by a werewolf and became one himself. He then learned through bionic means how to control his instincts and transformation, getting a special wolf belt to wear from the secret US government organization for which he works. This new story begins when secret agent West is spying on a suspect, Ossie Weiner, who is sixty ..read more

Nineteenth-century French vampire fiction is usually marginalized in vampire studies compared to the better-known British vampire works by John William Polidori, James Malcolm Rymer, J. S. Le Fanu, and Bram Stoker. However, French Gothic literature of the time had a stronger vampire tradition than Great Britain, the United States, or other nations’ literatures. What makes French vampire literature particularly unique is its depiction of female vampires. Female vampires are nonexistent in British literature until J. S. Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871) unless one counts the enigmatic Geraldine of Coler ..read more

Recently, I had the pleasure of meeting author Wade Walker at a publishing conference. After we discussed our mutual admiration for Dark Shadows, Hammer Horror films, and werewolf fiction, I was intrigued to read his debut novel, Bite of the Wolf. Although not a nineteenth-century Gothic work like I usually blog about, Bite of the Wolf plays in interesting ways with many classic Gothic elements, updating them for the twenty-first century. The novel begins when Val West, who works for a secret American government organization, is on assignment in Transylvania where he is attacked and bitten by ..read more

After reading The Quaker City (1845) by George Lippard (1822-1854), which I blogged about earlier this year, I was intrigued to find at Amazon a novel titled The Mysteries of Florence by Lippard. I was surprised an American author would choose a foreign city as the subject for a city mysteries novel. However, it turns out The Mysteries of Florence is not a city mysteries novel at all. The first city mysteries novel was Eugene Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris (1842-3), and that was the work Lippard was imitating in writing The Quaker City. However, The Mysteries of Florence was probably written or ..read more

This blog post is a follow-up to one I posted on September 18, 2017 on Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs. In that post, I lamented that no complete biography has been published of Jane Porter and that there has been no critical edition of the novel. Since then, Devoney Looser published her wonderful biography of Jane Porter and her sister Anna Maria Porter, titled Sister Novelists. I posted about Looser’s biography on January 10, 2023. Besides being a well-researched and thoroughly interesting biography, it revealed to me that the edition of The Scottish Chiefs I own and have read twice, the S ..read more

In Gothic Fiction, certain types show up again and again: the loyal retainer, the obsessed scientist, the corrupt doctor, the greedy villain, the sickly invalid, the helpless child, the naive bride, the old eccentric, the mentally deranged person…. What’s interesting is that each character can assume several of these roles. For example, the mentally deranged person may also be the helpless child—or he may be the greedy villain, or the obsessed scientist, or the old eccentric at the end of his life. The newly arrived outsider could also be the naive bride or the sickly invalid or the obsessed s ..read more

I have written extensively at this blog about the city mysteries genre, which began with Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris. Sue’s novel inspired a plethora of imitations, including Paul Féval’s The Mysteries of London (discussed in my book Vampire Grooms and Spectre Brides: The Marriage of French and British Gothic Literature), George W. M. Reynolds’ The Mysteries of London, Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo, and George Lippard’s The Quaker City. Authors around the world wrote novels in a similar vein and often with the same title pattern. However, until recently, Portugal’s contrib ..read more

“his trousers here, his towels there, and his French novels everywhere.” — Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone The above quote from Wilkie Collins’ 1868 masterpiece[i] testifies that young gentlemen in England at the time were reading French novels, and yet the influence of French literature has been all but ignored by most scholars of British Gothic literature. This omission is surprising given that French novels were read in England by a wide audience in the nineteenth century as British literature of the period itself testifies. Besides the reference in Collins’ The Moonstone, in Anthony Trollope ..read more

Today, we have a guest post by author and Gothic lover Rayne Hall. First, I’ll introduce her, then she’ll talk about Dickens’ “The Signal-Man” and then she has a special offer regarding her new book you won’t want to miss! Rayne Hall MA is the author of over 100 books, mostly Dark Fantasy and Gothic Horror, e.g. The Bride’s Curse: Bulgarian Gothic Ghost and Horror Stories. She is also the acclaimed editor of Gothic, Fantasy and Horror anthologies (e.g. Among the Headstones: Creepy Tales from the Graveyard, and author of the bestselling Writer’s Craft series for advanced-level writers, includi ..read more

In 2017, I wrote a blog post here on Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs (1810), in which I lamented that more is not known about Jane Porter or her relationship with Sir Walter Scott in connection to the development of the historical novel. That gap in literary history has now been filled by a monumental biography just published by Devoney Looser titled Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës. The lack of information about Jane Porter available is apparent just in the fact that I was clueless she had a sister, Anna Maria Porter, who was al ..read more