MP3 CD Format
Two tales from the golden age of supernatural fiction
The Haunted House at Latchford by Mrs. J. H. Riddell
Mrs. J. H. Riddell excelled at blending the realistic and supernatural elements in her stories. In Essex she found the right dreary setting for The Haunted House at Latchford, “where beyond the fated house and ruined garden lay the belt of pine trees and the lake of the dismal swamp, which had furnished Crow Hall with no less than two tragedies.""
The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins
Like Edgar Allan Poe before him and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle after, Wilkie Collins shifted easily from rational domains to the “superrational."" The Haunted Hotel exhibits the same relentless pace and narrative power, the same attention to plot and backdrop detail that distinguish The Moonstone and The Woman in White, along with the obsession with destiny and the willful struggle against it. Collins's much-loved Venice provides the scenery and fatal beauty, the grim waterways and palaces the author will haunt with mysterious women, grotesques, and bloody conspiracies.
Charlotte Riddell (1832-1906), who wrote as Mrs. J. H. Riddel, was one of the most popular and influential writers of the Victorian period. Her first novel, The Moors and the Fens, appeared in 1858. She issued it under the pseudonym of F. G. Trafford, which she abandoned for her own name in 1864. Between 1858 and 1902, she published thirty novels and tales. She was a prominent writer of ghost stories.
Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) studied law and was admitted to the bar but never practiced. Instead, he devoted his time to writing and is best known for his novels The Woman in White, No Name, Armadale, and The Moonstone, which has been called the finest detective story ever written. A number of his works were collaborations with his close friend, Charles Dickens. The Woman in White so gripped the imagination of the world that Wilkie Collins had his own tombstone inscribed: ""Author of The Woman in White.""