The King in Yellow

The first American gothic novel, from 1798. A family is destroyed by voices nobody can trace, and Brown leaves the question of their source open.

Charles Brockden Brown

Ichabod Crane rides home through a haunted Dutch valley and meets the Headless Horseman. American folklore turned into gothic comedy.

Washington Irving

Poe compresses the entire gothic tradition into one story about a decaying house and the twins inside it. The house and the family fall together.

Edgar Allan Poe

A murderer insists on his own sanity while the sound of a heartbeat grows under the floorboards. Poe at his most concentrated.

Edgar Allan Poe

A curse laid at a witch trial still works on the Pyncheon family two centuries later. Hawthorne relocates gothic guilt into New England property.

Nathaniel Hawthorne