The Black Robe

Dostoevsky's portrait of a young murderer unraveling under the weight of his own conscience. A landmark of the psychological novel where every street and every silence becomes part of the punishment.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

A young scientist gives life to a being he cannot bear to look at, and pays for the act with the rest of his own life. The horror is not the creature; it is what living with him does to a mind.

Mary Shelley

Stoker's gothic novel told through letters, journal entries and press clippings, which slowly assemble the figure of a predator who feeds on the will of others. The dread builds in the gaps between voices.

Bram Stoker

A portrait keeps the record of every cruelty and every sin while its subject stays beautiful. Wilde turns a single bargain into a long, slow study of self-knowledge refused.

Oscar Wilde

A respectable London doctor finds a chemical way to release the part of himself he has spent a lifetime caging. The novella is short; the dread it leaves about the divided mind is not.

Robert Louis Stevenson