Welcome to Litsy!

The endpapers ???
Mainly poetry, with some selections from prose works, Charlie Castelletti has chosen a wonderful array of passages exemplifying the storm-ridden, darkly romantic heart of The Gothic. It's a great introduction for any making a first venture into the genre, with enough variety and depth to satisfy the ardent initiate.
My smallest, tiniest, infinitesimal criticism is that there's no extract from Walpole's "The Castle of Otranto".

"The earth is a tomb,
The gaudy sky a vault,
We but walking corpses"
- Mary Shelley, "On Ghosts"

If this section heading strikes a reverberating knell in your soul, then you'll probably appreciate this selection of gothic fragments. It's certainly apt for the season ???
Oh! No word of a lie: "Bela Lugosi's Dead" by Bauhaus just came up on my random playlist! Spooky! ?
#BooksAndMusic

"You are afraid to die?"
"Yes, everyone is."
"But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together." ?❣️?
- From "Carmilla", by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: the seductive, and destructive, allure of the vampire! ??‍♀️

They need to stop, or at least slow down, publishing books 'cos I can't keep up & I'm falling behind! 📚🏃‍♂️
Anyway, trying to keep myself in the race, today's #BookHaul
Tagged is a great little book in the Macmillan's Collectors series, being a florilegium of gothic excerpts from literature, essays & poems 👻🌕🏰
The Mysteries is a picture book which looks wonderful, one of the two artists being the Calvin & Hobbes guy 🏚️⬇️