#dr. polidori

[writervblavender]

Chapter 1. Part 1. William Lamb

"...Brocket Hall was dark and lonely that night, even the silent shadows seemed menacing. The Lambs still weren’t used to the darkness of the countryside and it would take some adjustment. Their family had recently moved their household back to their country estate, Brocket Hall, to quiet the suggestions of an affair between Lady Caroline Lamb and the upstart poet, Lord Byron..."

-V. B. Lavender, To Be The Hunter or the Hunted via Youtube (it's an audiobook)

There are subtitles available too on the videos. This will be an ongoing project posting to YouTube every so often.

[burningvelvet]

my dealer: got some straight gas 🔥😛 this strain is called “laudanum-dosed wine at the villa diodati on lake geneva in 1816” 😳 you’ll be zonked out of your gourd 💯

me: yeah whatever i don’t feel shit

5 minutes later: dude i swear i just saw mary shelley and claire clairmont talking about reanimation and vampires with lord byron

my buddy percy pacing: dr. john polidori is plotting against us and my wifes nipples have been replaced by eyeballs

[sarnie-for-varney]

WARNING: FLASHING IMAGES

Dr. Polidori/Marko - Haunted Summer/The Lost Boys

Song: Cirice - Ghost

Since Marko's a vampire, I wanted it to be like Polidori is Marko in the 19th century (before he was turned) and that he's finally had enough of everyone treating him like shit 😂

[luanna801]

Jekyll and Hyde/The Vampyre crossover where allegedly it's about Hyde and Ruthven teaming up to do Some Mischief(TM), but in practice it mostly ends up being Jekyll and Ruthven loudly complaining about how no one can correctly pronounce their Scottish last names.

*It's technically supposed to be 'Jeekil' and 'Riven' respectively, but even adaptations frequently get it wrong.

[bakedbakermom]

there are times when i really sympathize with victor frankenstein because i too wish to create an abomination just because i can.

[ben-the-hyena]

5 for the ask thingy!

5. Talk about a WIP!

YES I KNOW I KNOW Of Blood and Hearts IS ON HIATUS AND I LET IT HANGING ON A CLIFFHANGER I AM SO SORRY ITS JUST THE FOLLOWING CHAPTER IS VERY COMPLEX NOT ONLY THERE WAS THE NEED FOR A HIATUS BECAUSE I WROTE TOO MUCH ON ONE MONTH AND NEEDED A BREAK IT ALSO IS A TRICKY CHAPTER BECAUSE, SPOILER, IT'S GONNA BE THEIR FIRST KISS AS WELL AS A RESCUE CHAPTER (Remember Ironfang gets caught by Polidori) SO I WANT TO BALANCE THINGS OUT NATURALLY AND MAKE THEM NOT FORCED AND I ALSO NEES TO THINK HOW BATORIA HELPS HIL ESCAPE AND HOW THE KISS COMES A NATURAL WAY SO IT'S *HARD*

[ansatsu-sha]

Dr. Polidori / The Fear Index S1E2

[artemismatchalatte]

The demon Faust's Introduction to the Regency/Romantic era AU for this project...

"Perhaps the Dr. Polidori of your world had called Byron a vampire to mock him, but this world’s Polidori wouldn’t be insulting My Lord if he said the same, he’d be merely speaking the truth.

When you’re ready, take my claws in your hands, and I’ll spirit you to my world. Then you can meet Lord Byron yourself and decide whether or not he was a monster."

-V.B. Lavender, Dear Reader: Faust's Introduction, To be The Hunter or The Hunted (via Youtube)

Yes, there's subtitles on my videos too (it's an audio book). That will take some time to update the individual videos (and add the later chapters). But I decided to put this project up, after some debate.

[savagewildnerness]

Immortal, bloodthirsty creatures that feed on humans - they have sharp fangs and a hatred for sunlight and garlic.

Vampires might not be the hero you typically root for, but they have transfixed us for centuries.

The first short story about the monster written in the English language was John Polidori's The Vampyre in 1819.

More followed, with Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897 inspiring F.W. Murnau's silent film Nosferatu in 1922. This is now being remade by Robert Eggers and is set to be released in the UK in 2025, starring Bill Skarsgård, Lily-Rose Depp and Nicholas Hoult.

But what's driving our hunger for vampire stories?

For writer and actor Mark Gatiss, his fascination with vampires started early. The co-writer of BBC drama series Sherlock and Dracula has been a "horror obsessive" for as long as he can remember.

Gatiss went on from a childhood love of scary stories to star as Dracula in an audio production, made a documentary on the monster as well as a 2020 BBC series, which sees the Count (played by Claes Bang) venture to London.

He says the opportunity to bring Stoker's iconic vampire to life felt "too good to be true".

"Like Sherlock Holmes, it's an imperishable myth and, really, if anyone gives you the chance to have a go at it - you have to do it," he explains.

Gatiss explains an image of Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes "silhouetted against a doorway when he comes back from the dead with his collar up" helped spark the 2020 Dracula series with Claes Bang

Rolin Jones is an executive producer and a writer on the TV adaptation of Interview with the Vampire, based on Anne Rice's collection of novels.

The series, available on BBC iPlayer, follows vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (played by Jacob Anderson) who shares the story of his life and relationship with Lestat de Lioncourt (played by Sam Reid) with a journalist.

He explains stories about the vampires "come back over and over again" because they "get in your bones and haunt you," with many raising questions of immortality, death and love.

The modern popularity of the figures can be seen on social media with #vampire having 2.7 million posts on TikTok.

Jones adds that each day he will see more people tattooing the characters' faces on their body, explaining "this is a rabid fan base".

"They're really tense and complex characters", Jones says

'Scared me to death'

While the characteristics of fictional vampires have changed throughout history - some burn to a crisp in the sunlight, others have famously sparkly skin - they have one thing in common: immortality.

Dr Sam George - an associate professor at the University of Hertfordshire who taught students about vampires in fiction - explains that part of the reason the monster endures is because they "get us to think about the big questions that concern us, ideas about ageing" as well as "what happens beyond the grave".

She adds that "the vampire's always been linked very strongly with disease, with contagion," adding that if we look back in history we can see that our interest in the immortal monster seems to pique around times of mass disease.

"When the first fictional vampire appeared in 1819, there was a strong link with tuberculosis," she says.

"Nosferatu is made to actually look like plague rats," Dr George explains

She adds that F.W. Murnau's silent film Nosferatu in 1922, centring on a character famous for the plagued rats he brought in his wake, came shortly after the Spanish influenza pandemic.

The academic adds that this is "really important to why vampires are so popular and on trend now, when you think of Nosferatu and its link to the plague, post Covid we're very interested in the vampire as contagion."

Executive producer Jones adds that a key point of interest for him lies in working out why vampires want to keep living. "You take mortality out of any drama, and it's quite interesting," he says.

Jones adds that Ms Rice herself wrote the novel after losing her daughter and that this sense of "grief and mourning" is "exceptionally articulated" in the book.

'They seduce you'

"There's this allure to them," Jones says of vampires - like Assad Zaman, who plays the vampire Armand and Jacob Anderson, who plays Louis de Pointe du Lac

While vampires may let us play out our fears about mortality and death, Jones adds that there is something else that draws us to the fanged figures.

"They're the sexiest, the most sensual of monsters," he says. "They seduce you."

Jones adds that when he first picked up the novel Interview with the Vampire, "it seemed to me what I was reading was this really repressed and really messy love story."

Dr George agrees, explaining "vampires have gotten younger and better looking over the years" and notes the difference between Nosferatu and Twilight's Edward Cullen (played by Robert Pattinson).

The academic adds there has been "a shift" in the way people read vampire fiction, explaining there has been a lot of interest in the topic of sexuality and vampires, like the "queer family" presented in Ms Rice's novel. 

The combination of love and immortality, Dr George says, is also seen in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film Bram Stoker's Dracula, which ran with the tagline "love never dies".

For Dr George, the "sense that the vampire can address a number of questions all at once," from death to love is the reason it stays with us today.

This article made me curious (I haven't put combination of some/all as an option as 100% would vote for it, as of course it isn't just one thing... so I ask the *most* significant thing for you)...

Edit to add that this is very difficult even for me to answer and I created the poll. Now, I'd say existential questions would be my top answer, but when I first read the books, it was the exploration of the outsider/difference I think for me, so perhaps that's the truest answer?

[godzilla-reads]

My Year of Gothic Reading 2024

Rules: For each month in 2024 you have to pick either a book, poem, or short story to read that carries gothic themes or aesthetic. Here's a list of suggested reading, but feel free to read something else or add others onto this list!

Books

"Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier

"The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James

"Frankenstein" by Mary Shelley

"The Mysteries of Udolpho" by Ann Radcliffe

"The Phantom of the Opera" by Gaston Leroux

"Dracula" by Bram Stoker

"The Castle of Otranto" by Horace Walpole

"The Monk" by Matthew Lewis

"The Haunting of Hill House" by Shirley Jackson

"Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte

"The Picture of Dorian Gray" by Oscar Wilde

"Carmilla" by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

Short Stories

"The Great God Pan" by Arthur Machen

"The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe

"The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving

"The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Hr. Hyde" by Robert Louis Stevenson

"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson

"The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allan Poe

"The Sandman" by E.T.A. Hoffman

"The Mark of the Beast" by Rudyard Kipling

"The Vampyre" by John William Polidori

"The Birds" by Daphne du Maurier

"The Cats of Ulthar" by H.P. Lovecraft

Poems

"The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe

"The cold earth slept below" by Percy Bysshe Shelley

"The Lady of Shalott" by Lord Alfred Tennyson

"My own Beloved, who has lifted me" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"What Would I Give?" by Christina Rossetti

"Time to Come" by Walt Whitman

"Love and Death" by Lord Byron

"Because I could not stop for Death" by Emily Dickinson

"La Belle Dame sans Merci" by John Keats

"The End" by D.H. Lawrence

"Hymn to the Night" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

"The Possessed" by Charles Baudelaire

[the-crooked-library]

"You and I Have Begun to Blur"

This is eating my brain from inside, so here's the thing: one of my favourite aspects of Hannigram as a ship is their balance - the way they mirror and complete each other, functionally two halves of the same whole; but what is even more fascinating is that, in a literary sense, Hannibal and Will are, in fact, inspired by two opposing aspects of the same man.

It all begins (like many other things) with Lord Byron; specifically, the summer he spent with a group of friends at Villa Diodati in Geneva, and the dare, that each member of the group would write a ghost story - one of which was Dr. Polidori's The Vampyre. This novella, which introduced the vampire legend to Western popular culture, defined its archetypes for centuries to come; and as such, Polidori's Lord Ruthven, who was based on Lord Byron, became a blueprint.

He is dark, foreign, seductive, dangerous, hypnotizing, hedonistic, possessive; his relationship with the main character, Aubrey, is markedly homoerotic - and these qualities endure as the archetype is passed down the generations. From Ruthven, we get Carmilla, Dracula, Lestat - and, indeed, Hannibal Lecter.

From this:

To this:

he is still, recognizably, a Byronic villain. Whether he operates within an overtly supernatural genre, or a psychological thriller, he is still confident, dominant, manipulative, and always representative of forbidden (queer, interracial, extramarital, etc) desire and temptation.

However, The Vampyre was not the only piece written for the same dare, not the only piece that left a legacy within popular horror, and, most importantly for this context, not the only piece that featured a Byronic character. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein introduced a second such archetype into the gothic genre - inspired by her own understanding of Lord Byron; so, while her Victor Frankenstein shares the same dark hair and pallor as Polidori's Ruthven, there is an ocean of differences between the two.

Victor Frankenstein is a Tortured Genius. He is odd and wild, passionate, prone to isolation; a misfit from the start, always lonely despite the few connections he has, and never truly understood. His intellect is both a gift and the source of his ruin, and he is plagued, in equal measure, by both pride and guilt.

In both looks and character, he passes almost unchanged - from this:

To this:

Even centuries later, he is still the smartest man in the room, he is always tormented, and his counterpart is always a Monster. We see him pop up throughout horror media - as poets, composers, detectives - reflected in Edgar Allan Poe's Roderick Usher, Lovecraft's Henry Wilcox, or Spencer Reid of Criminal Minds. Unlike those of Ruthven's lineage, these people are usually either frail or sickly, socially awkward, uncertain of themselves except for a specific area of expertise, and their sanity commonly tends to be in question.

Despite such differences, though, all these characters are Lord Byron's legacy, weaving their way through history - on the page, on the stage, on the screen, it matters not. By the time they meet again in NBC's Hannibal, they are as separate as two entities can be - yet entwined more closely than any other genre would allow.

Frankly, it drives me feral.

There is so much here to unpack - they are a whole, and yet separate, each with his own archetypal history. Does something within Will Graham's bones remember Frankenstein when he stands in the forensic lab, surrounded by corpses?.. On the Doylist level, does that inform the acting - however subconsciously - in any way?.. Does Count Hannibal Lecter have Lord Ruthven's smile - or Lord Byron's?.. Does he know?

How much is reality?

How much is fiction?

How much is lost through interpretation? How much is remembered? How much does anyone ever really Know us, truly, when two of Byron's closest friends saw entirely different people in him?

I don't know. We can never know. What is evident, though, is that Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham are two halves of the same soul - and that this soul aches to be complete.

[pynkhues]

https://x.com/lestatdelioncat/status/1858608673855336516?t=KsAra9iHb3aUiMDx21TF2w&s=19 I dont understand what Jacob meant by this and I definitely would argue that Louis isn't the most vampire but that Claudia is

Mmm, yeah. My interpretation of what Jacob’s saying there is that Louis has an enormous capacity for self-indulgence, and its because he has that, that he has to restrain himself so fully. That makes sense to me, I think we see that in 2.05 in particular between all the boys and the drugs, but I think we also see it in how he bottles things up until they explode out of him and he does things like murder the Alderman Fenwick in a pretty gory and performative way, and, y’know, swims the Mississippi to get at Lestat (in more ways than one!)

Does that make him more vampiric? I don’t know if I think that does, but it begs the question of what you think determines a vampire’s core characteristics? It’s an ever-evolving archetype, and has definitely gone through a lot of iterations in the last twenty years in particular, but I think if you’re looking at the origins in traditional gothic literature, Louis is in many ways the quintessential vampire.

So! Let's have a look at that.

The origins of the vampire

The concept of a vampire in literature was actually created in the same summer retreat that Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in, which is a delightful little slice of history. You can read more about it here if you’re interested, but the nuts and bolts of it is that a freshly-divorced Lord Byron, his doctor, Dr. Polidori, as well as Percy and Mary Shelly, and Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont (who was pregnant with Byron’s child, a child he really didn’t want), went on a summer retreat to Switzerland together, and basically just spent months reading each other ghost stories which ultimately culminated in Byron suggesting they have a competition to see who could write the best one.

Hilariously, none of them really wrote a ghost story – Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, and Byron actually wrote two things, although he only finished one – a poem called The Darkness which is effectively a dystopian poem about the end of the world – and his unfinished project was a novel about a dying man who swears he’ll be resurrected to visit his friend after he dies.

It's this that’s actually taken up by Byron’s doctor, Dr. Polidori, who turns it into the 1819 short story, The Vampyre, with the lead character being heavily based on Byron himself.

In Polidori’s story, it features a man, Aubrey, observing his rich, sexy male friend, Lord Ruthven, who has superhuman strength and can’t be killed by bullets, and who seems to keep seducing women important to Aubrey right before they mysteriously die. Basically Aubrey slowly realizes through mounting dread that Lord Ruthven survives by drinking the blood of innocent women.

I’ve talked a lot about the Byronic Hero (and how I think Louis embodies the trope), so I won’t go too much into it here, but my point is that the original concept of a vampire is inherently built on those romantic ideas of class and wealth (which is important for reasons I’ll get into shortly), sophistication and intelligence, hiding in plain sight and seduction, and is generally understood to have queer subtext which many read into the relationship between Aubrey and Lord Ruthven (Ruthven literally seduces and murders Aubrey’s lover and his sister, isolating him to his companionship). He’s also inherently Byronic, being first started by him, and later based on him – Byron truly isthe I-don’t-know-if-I-want-to-be-him-or-be-with-him guy of literary history, haha.

Building on the origins and evolving the metaphor

It was the late 1800s though when some of the most genre-defining stories were published. The two biggest being Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871) and, of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). The genre had evolved already at this point, but the archetype actually didn’t change all that much. In fact, the vampire as someone who is rich, predatory and seductive became character traits that became metaphors in and of themselves, namely as a class metaphor. This was started with Lord Ruthven in The Vampyre, but it’s really expanded here, particularly in Dracula, who’s understood in the context of the 1890s to represent the solitary nature of monopoly capital that sucks the life from the labouring classes. He hoards his wealth through land and gold, and preys on the working class.

There’s been a lot written on this, so I won’t labour the point, but the understanding of vampires as symbols of aristocracy and capitalism has always existed, and I know that we joke about Louis being the first vampire capitalist, but it’s actually not true. Capitalism has always been a vital part of the genre, because class has always been a central tenet of classic gothic fiction, for better and for worse.

Wealth and class is also central to Carmilla. It’s set in the 1800s in Austria while the wealth gap between the rich and poor is increasing, and Carmilla comes from an aristocratic, old money family. She benefits from being rich, and she uses her social power as a rich aristocrat in order to seduce and prey on people in the lower classes. Again, the entwining of wealth and class is really prevalent, but interestingly too, Carmilla’s the most explicitly queer of all of these early vampire stories, with the lesbian relationship woven through it effectively textual, but Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu also posits two means of being turned into a vampire, which is kind of uniquely interesting to me.

One is the way we know – vampires turn vampires, but the second is that vampires are people who’ve been rejected by God, whether due to suicide, as explicitly stated in the book, or excommunication from the church for a sinful life. While this hasn’t literally carried forward much in the genre, I do actually think its still there. The elements of sin and quote-unquote ‘corruption’ are still threaded through most vampire fiction even today, and while hedonism is more common in modern vampires, there are elements of misery that feel pervasive. The idea that vampires are born either through being turned, corrupted or dying by their own hand is just one that I find really interesting, and I think also speaks a bit to elements of the Byronic Hero that the vampire is inherently steeped in as an archetype.

…And evolving some more

It was actually Anne’s books in the 70s that relaunched vampires into the stratosphere popularity-wise, and they did evolve in theme and metaphor as a result. Vampires are understood to be manifestations of current anxieties, which yes, in the 1800s was the rise of monopolistic capitalism, female sexuality and homosexuality, and in the 70s through 80s became metaphors for anxieties around STIs, the AIDS crisis, and addiction in particular, but these themes of class and misery never left the genre.

That said, the Vampire as an archetype in and of itself was also informed in this period really by the Milton’s Satan archetype which has gone on to form the modern concept of the anti-hero. I talked a lot about the Milton’s Satan archetype here in terms of Lestat, but the important thing to note is that it holds to the idea of a protagonist as a fallen angel who becomes a hero-villain, hedonistic, vain, proud and horribly, terribly human.

So, do I think Louis’ the most vampiric of the vampires?

Yeah, actually. In a lot of ways, Louis marries all the foundations of the traditional vampire. He’s as wealthy, intelligent, and seductive as Lord Ruthven was, but he really feeds into the late 1800s vampire as a symbol of the parasitic nature of monopolistic capitalism and landed wealth. He chooses to be solitary and rejects community, he’s using women’s bodies to keep his family in wealth, he’s hoarding and commodifying art and wishing death on artists to increase profit, he’s gentrifying San Francisco, he’s turned in a church on a night he likely would’ve commit suicide, tying back into Le Fanu’s idea of alternate ways of vampires being turned, hell, he’s even doing drugs with addicts in the sprawl of the seventies, using his social power over Daniel by flaunting his wealth to get him into a room with him.

And he’s a Byronic Hero. So he’s miserable while he does it, haha.

That joy in the hunt that Claudia has to me is more like Lestat’s, which I do think as I said in the Milton’s Satan / Fallen Angel archetype post is more tied up in the demonic than the vampiric, traditionally speaking. There’s definitely crossover though, especially as Milton’s Satan has informed the modern anti hero, and vampires are generally always anti heroes in modern fiction. I don’t think Claudia necessarily is a Milton’s Satan either – I’ve said it before, but I think she’s a true Gothic Heroine – but she definitely has some of those attributes of a fallen angel, particularly in the sense of hedonism and perversion of form and family.

In a lot of ways, it’s part of the fun with Claudia – she gets these elements of both Louis and Lestat, and gets to be her own thing too. Her vampirism is its own unique monstrousness, but I don’t think she plays as cleanly into the traditional vampire as Louis does.

I'll leave it there, because this is way more than you asked for, anon, haha, sorry. Hopefully it's interesting.

[sixxysidepiece]

Trying to think up some vampire names from the Matsuno's/Matsunovs, here's what I've got so far

Osomatsu = Osucard (Alucard obvs)

Karamatsu = Karamilla (Carmilla)

Choromatsu = Chorothan (Jonathan Harker from Dracula)

Ichimatsu = Polichi (from Dr. Polidori, author of The Vampyre)

Jyushimatsu = Jyushimatiu (default)*

Todomatsu = Lestot (Lestsat from The Vampire Chronicales)

* I couldn't come up with or find any good enough character name for Jyushi particularly, not without it being impossible to guess or veering into weird territory. If anyone has any other suggestions i would LOVE to hear it

EDIT: changed Totty’s name to something more appropriate for him

[sarnie-for-varney]

They genuinely don't even look like the same person

[diewhitegirls]

mister Prodfessor Dr septimus sanguinare pretorius Polidori syring:e(💉9)

[bloodsuckingviolet]

🎃Ultimate October Reading List👻

I compiled a list of 20+ of my favorite spooky reads, the creepiest, darkest paranormal stories and novels that are perfect to read when October comes around. Feel free to add your favorites in the comments or reblogs!

-Gwen��

The Banshee's Warning by Charlotte Riddell (haunting banshee)

The Black Cat by Edgar Allen Poe (black cats, supernatural)

The Case of the Leannabh Sidhe by Margery Lawrence (changelings, evil fairies)

The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (classic ghost tropes; considered to be the very first gothic novel)

Carmilla by Sheridan le Fanu (lesbian vampyres...need I say more?)

A Chapter in the History of a Tyrone Family by Sheridan le Fanu (haunted, eroding castle, jilted wife)

A Dead Man of Varley Grange by Anonymous (cursed cottage)

The Dead Sexton by Sheridan le Fanu (mysterious corpse thief)

Dracula by Bram Stoker (THEE vampyre, superstitions)

Dobrev (young clairvoyants, succubus, written by yours truly!)

The Family of a Vourdalak by Aleksey Tolstoy (vampyre, recently adapted into a fantastically weird French film)

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (creation, horrors of life)

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen (supernatural, erotic)

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (paranormal, curses)

Hugues, the Wer-wolf by Sutherland Menzies (OG werewolf story)

In the Closed Room by Frances Hodgson Burnett (ghosts, mysterious closed door)

Laura Silver Bell by Sheridan le Fanu (evil fairies, witchcraft)

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving (ghosts, autumn vibes)

The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis (cruel and dark, such an insane read!)

The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs (supernatural, death)

The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (gothic romance, castles, supernatural)

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (ghost, romance)

The Sandman by E.T.A. Hoffmann (dark fairy tale elements, obsession)

The Shadow of a Shade by Tom Hood (haunted portrait)

The Story of Medhans Lea by E. and H. Heron (haunted house, men getting scared, lol)

Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (murder, good vs. evil)

Tales of Terror from the Black Ship by Chris Priestley (underrated horror author!)

Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth by Christ Priestley (eerie and disturbing short stories)

The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe (guilt, murder)

The Tomb of Sarah by Frederick Loring (cursed tomb)

The Trod by Algernon Blackwood (evil fairies)

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James (ghosts)

Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror by Chris Priestley (first of a great ghostly, gruesome trilogy)

The Vampyre by John Polidori (one of the OG vamp tales; seductive, evil vampyre torments a young man and his sister)

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (even creepier than the movie)