Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1818-1873), heir to the Gothic tradition, has left us an incomparable collection of stories where rugged mysteries, ghost chronicles and supernatural terror abound, always showing himself as a master renovator of the horror story. Le Fanu is the true initiator of the contemporary ghost story; imagined one of the vampire genre's most illustrious nightmares: Carmilla, the fascinating vampire woman, and brought to life a unique character: Dr. Martin Hesselius, who prefigures professional occult detectives in the manner of Van Helsing - Dracula's vampire slayer - John Silence, the investigator for Algernon Blackwood, or Carnacki, Hodgson's Ghostbusters. This edition gathers part of his production in the field of ghosts and supernatural mystery, and evidences in it the consideration of the corrupt nature of the human soul as the generator of Evil, or of the vision of the Abyss - the descent into hell or place of eternal despair, so that the psychological deformation of man becomes a putrefaction of the Cosmos.