...atmosphere you will get in Bram Stoker's The Mystery of the Sea! I am not very far into the book--it has been slow going for me. As much as I am finding that I really love Victorian literature, sometimes it can be rather dense reading and I have to really concentrate--at least to start out. Also it seems to go better when I read a small chunk (a few chapters at a time at least) rather than a few pages here and there. Only five chapters in and already there has been the gift of second sight to our narrator, Archibald Hunter. There is an old woman, Gormala, who can foretell death--and seems to keep popping up everywhere he goes. And now I (along with Archibald and Gormala) have just witnessed a procession of ghostly figures...
"Up the steep path came a silent procession of ghostly figures, so misty of outline that through the grey green of their phantom being the rocks and moonlit sea were apparent, and even the velvet blackness of the shadows of the rocks did not lose their gloom."
I am curious about all the appendices (full of ciphers) at the back of the book--I am assuming to help solve the mystery of the sea. Perhaps a Spanish Galleon and a sailor will come into play? I will be finding out!
Since I am reading the Stoker at a snail's pace (or so it feels like), I also started Edgar Allen Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue (The Dupin Tales). A few interesting facts about Poe: he was the son of idigent actors, had to leave school due to gambling debts, married his cousin when she was not yet 14 (!), and he publicly feuded with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (and I swear there was some sort of court case, but now I can't find where I read that). In any case, he sounded like an interesting fellow all around. And I plan on reading his one novel when I finally break down and start buying books again! Until then I will have to satisfy myself with his short stories (I have another book set aside for just that purpose).
The Poe book I am reading is a lovely Modern Library edition that has three stories--along with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", there is "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter". I believe he based his second story on an actual murder that was never solved. He changed the setting to Paris, and M. Dupin was born. M. Dupin reminds me quite a lot of Sherlock Holmes. In this first short story, Dupin will solve the crime almost exclusively from the facts in the newspaper clippings he reads using "ratiocination" or analytical deduction. I seem to be going further and further back in terms of detective stories. Just when I thought I went back to the beginning there is always someone else who wrote them first!