Project Gutenberg now has some awfully interesting stuff, and to help promote it, I think that from time to time I’ll post links to particular material which I think others might have fun reading. I’ll be archiving these under the category “Gutenberg Gems”, which you’ll be able to get by my category menus on the right.

The first of these is the author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Le Fanu is the author of what I consider to be the second great vampire story, Carmilla, as well as many other classic ghostly stories which are well represented in the Project Gutenberg archives. While I don’t know if Stoker’s Dracula was influenced by Le Fanu’s work, the similarities in narrative style are quite striking. In some ways, Le Fanu’s Carmilla, with its subtle undertone of lesbian sexuality surpasses Dracula in terms of character development if not actual story telling. Give him a read.