Oldstyle Tales Press

Many of James’ best stories are nightmarish wish fulfilments of their author’s own personal fantasies. We see this in “A Warning to the Curious,” where the narrator bewails (“alas! alas!”) the 17th century destruction of an uncovered Anglo-Saxon crown, and proudly crows about laying eyes on one (“I can now say that I have seen an actual Anglo-Saxon crown”), full well knowing tha...

One of Washington Irving’s most deliciously Gothic tales—perhaps rivaled only by The Adventure of the German Student—“Guests from Gibbet Island” would have felt perfectly at home in Tales of a Traveller, whether among the metaphysical “Stories by a Nervous Gentleman” or the piratical “Money-Diggers.” It was published relatively late in Irving’s career as a literary “single” (an ...

One of the classic tropes of Gothic fiction is the haunted portrait: the dusty painting of a grim figure in old-fashioned garb, whose eyes gleam in candlelight and seem to follow—or even blink at—the viewer from the shadows. Originally a feature of early Gothic novels, it later became a favorite device among writers of horror and weird fiction: Edgar Allan Poe (“The Oval Portrai...

Like “Guests from Gibbet Island,” the following tale is both grimmer than Irving’s usual fare and was first published in the Knickerbocker Magazine . Profoundly wistful—melancholy and dreamlike—it seems to offer a female-led counterpart to “The Legend of Don Munio de Sancho Hinojosa,” wherein a spectral company is glimpsed performing solemn rites beyond the veil of ordinary life...