Horror at Project Gutenberg

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The blogger on the banks of the San Juan River, Farmington, New Mexico, 2013

If you are an avid reader (of anything) and are not familiar with Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page), you are doing yourself a great disservice. As they state on their homepage:

Project Gutenberg offers over 46,000 free ebooks: choose among free epub books, free kindle books, download them or read them online.

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Over 100,000 free ebooks are available through our Partners, Affiliates and ResourcesOur ebooks may be freely used in the United States because most are not protected by U.S. copyright law, usually because their copyrights have expired. They may not be free of copyright in other countries. Readers outside of the United States must check the copyright laws of their countries before downloading or redistributing our ebooks. We also have a number of copyrighted titles, for which the copyright holder has given permission for unlimited non-commercial worldwide use.”

As they state, most of these books are available because their copyrights have expired, making them usually quite dated.  However, for anyone with a bent for the historical, Project Gutenberg is a gold mine.  I did a quick search for “horror” on their website and received 169 titles in response.  For a few, the only relation to the horror genre was the word “horror” in the title (such as “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases–which is a horrible subject, but is non-fiction vs. horror fiction).  However, many are the classics or founding works of the horror genre, such as Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Dracula by Bram Stoker, The Vampyre: a Tale by John William Polidori, The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, Fantome de’l Opera (Phantom of the Opera) by Gaston Leroux, many works by Edgar Allan Poe,  The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen, The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, The Shunned House by H.P. Lovecraft, and many others.

Please take the time to visit this treasure trove of literature and of the horror genre, and if you are so inclined, please consider making a donation (via their website) to support their worthy cause.

Thoughts?  Comments?

Author: S.P. Staff

Publisher of The Chamber Magazine and Rural Fiction Magazine.

One thought on “Horror at Project Gutenberg”

  1. i love Gutenberg and can recommended them highly. I use it regularly for my own short story blog where I post their links. I find stories on their site that I can’t find in the libraries or even to purchase online. The history of literature in one place, especially for supernatural, mystery, horror, and all that dark fiction, is a treasure.

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