The foremost teller of scary stories in his day and a profound influence on both the novelists and filmmakers of the 20th century, Anglo-Irish author JOSEPH THOMAS SHERIDAN LE FANU (1814-1873) has, sadly, fallen out of scholarly and popular favor, and unfairly so. To this day, contemporary readers who happen across his works praise his talent for weaving a tense literary atmosphere tinged by the supernatural and bolstered by hints of ambiguous magic. A splendid instance of the "sensation novel"-a genre that was wildly popular in the Victorian era, with its focus on lurid crime invading previously cheerful, ordinary, and domestic places-this 1871 novel creates a sinister