About the book: 2021 / The mystical stories of English and American writers collected in this book were created in the 19th - early 20th centuries - during the heyday of the horror story genre in the literature of the Old and New Worlds. Mysterious, incomprehensible, chilling, and sometimes curious incidents told in these stories put the heroes in extraordinary, trembling, sometimes deadly situations, open the door to otherworldly and infernal dimensions of existence, revive people from the other world, the ancient chthonic evil, dark magical rituals, superstitions and witchcraft of bygone times. Behind the veil of everyday reality, the authors of the stories (among whom such masters as Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Margaret Oliphant, Montague Rhodes James, Edward Frederic Benson, John Bakan) discover an eerie Gothic world that refutes the rational philosophical and scientific constructions and self-confident claims to omniscience inherent in man of the New Age.