Part I: It was a dark and stormy night...

This classic, cliche opening to a mystery, or Gothic tale, has always put a smile on my face. It brings to mind Snoopy typing these words atop his doghouse.

Said to have begun in the mid-18th century with Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, many feel the Gothic tale reached its apex during the Victorian Age. From Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, to Poe's Fall of the House of Usher, to Hawthorne's House of the Seven Gables, to Stoker's Dracula, tales of the macabre take the reader into a miasma of dark romance, the supernatural and the occult.

What better way to pass the chilly nights of autumn than sitting in a candle-lit room, reading some Gothic literature? Preferably with Mozart's "Requiem", Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis", or a Bach fugue playing softly.

As for mysteries, my taste leans to the hard-boiled detective genre, but more on that another time. - as ever - BB

"I have, indeed, no abhorrence to danger, except in its absolute effect - in terror." - Edgar Allen Poe's Fall of the House of Usher