Horror: The 100 Best Books Read Online Free Page B

20th-century terror tales whose only drive is to enforce the status quo. Lewis wanted to see how far he could go, and he went there. In a time when we are confronted with a flood of reassuring horror stories, each one promising its readers that everything awful exists only in others, the courage that Lewis displayed shines like a bloody beacon. And any book with a character called The Bleeding Nun can't be all bad. -- LES DANIELS
    6: [1814-16] E. T. A. HOFFMANN - The Best Tales of Hoffmann

    Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann never put his name to a collection under the title Tales of Hoffmann but since the success of Jacques Offenbach's opera Les Contes d'Hoffmann (1881), there have been several competing volumes under variations of the name, including R. J. Hollingdale's Tales of Hoffmann (1932), Leonard J. Kent and Elizabeth C. Knight's Tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1972), and Victor Lange's Tales (1982). The volume discussed here is E. F. Bleiler's selection, The Best Tales of Hoffmann . In Hoffmann's lifetime (1776-1822), his short horror pieces appeared in Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier (4 vols, 1814-15) and Nachtst(1816) , although several of his best-known works -- "The Golden Flowerpot", "The Sand-Man" -- were not published until after his death. Hoffmann's major horror novels are Die Elixier des Teufels (1815-16) and Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (1821-22). Offenbach's opera was marvellously filmed in 1951 by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, with Moira Shearer outstanding as Olimpia the Automaton.
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    This collection includes "The Sand-Man", the best-known of Hoffmann's stories, as well as "The Golden Flowerpot", a lavish alchemical tale whose passages of vivid fantasy brought grudging praise from Goethe. These and most of the remaining eight tales are unrolled like dreams, with all of the humour, horror, and superreality dreams require. In "Rath Krespin", a man collects rare violins only to dismantle them. A miser meets his doppelganger ("Signer Formica"). A machine whispers prophecies ("Automata"). A divinity student falls under the spell of a blue-eyed snake ("The Golden Flowerpot"). A miner is lured to his death by the glowing face of the Metal Queen ("The Mines of Falun"). In a comic-horrific tale "The King's Betrothed", a woman finds herself engaged to a carrot. But the deepest nightmare here is the "The Sand-Man". This dark tale was written in 1816, two years before Mary Shelley's Frankenstein , in a similar spirit of horrified fascination with science and its application to artificial life. Hoffmann is concerned with the horror of automata indistinguishable from real people. In "The Sand-Man", the nightmare is relentless. It begins with a child's confusion. A cruel nurse tells young Nathanael that the Sand-man "comes to little children when they won't go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they jump out of their heads all bloody". He believes the Sand-man is the lawyer Coppelius, who comes to the house nightly to visit his father on some mysterious errand. Later the child realizes the Sand-man is only a story, but he also senses that Coppelius has some unpleasant hold over his parents. The child hides and sees the men engaged in some secret experiment involving a forge and glowing metal. When Nathanael is discovered, Coppelius threatens to put out his eyes. In a later, "last" experiment, the secret forge explodes, killing Nathanael's father. Coppelius disappears. Grown-up Nathanael attends a distant university. One day a peddler comes to his room, selling barometers and thermometers. The peddler looks like the sinister Coppelius and calls himself Coppola. All the old nameless fears are aroused. Nathanael quarrels with his fianceHe soon becomes intrigued by the vision of Olimpia, the rather inert, beautiful daughter of his physics professor, Spalanzani. The professor lives across the street, and Nathanael can see Olimpia through a window. The peddler returns, offering to sell him