Supernatural in Modern English Fiction

This is the book that invented the study of supernatural fiction as a serious literary field. Originally a Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation so rigorous and illuminating that it broke free from academic obscurity into widespread publication, Scarborough's work traces the entire evolution of English ghost stories, horror tales, and weird fiction from their eighteenth-century Gothic origins through the sophisticated psychological terrors of the early twentieth century. She moves from Walpole's castle dungeons and Maturin's Caribbean demons to Henry James' destabilizing ambiguity and W.W. Jacobs' brutal ironic machinery, mapping not just plot patterns but the deeper cultural anxieties that make ghost stories irresistible. What emerges is a question that still haunts us: why do humans need to believe the dead refuse to stay dead? Scarborough examines the recurring architecture of supernatural literature, the cursed inheritance, the threshold between worlds, the guilt that manifests as spectral visitation, and argues that ghost stories are really about what we fear in ourselves. A hundred years later, this remains the foundational text for understanding why we read horror, and what our nightmares reveal about the living.