Joseph Sheridan le Fanu was the leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century, and he is now seen as central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era.

His work is credited with turning the Gothic's focus from the external sources of horror to the inward effects of terror, thus helping to create the psychological basis for supernaturalist literature that continues to this day.

Inspired by the Dutch painter Godfried Schalcken, 'Schalken the Painter' is a timeless Gothic tale. Many of the earliest occult stories, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive.