Weird Circle — 1943

The Weird Circle opens with Poe: Roderick Usher, his dying sister Madeline and the crumbling, doom-haunted family mansion that will not outlast them.

A husband and wife, taken with the portrait of a long-dead cutthroat, rent his supposedly haunted London house for a week to meet a real ghost -- from Bulwer-Lytton's "The Haunted and the Haunters."

A Corsican adaptation of Balzac's "La Vendetta": a father's blood-feud pride destroys his own daughter when she marries into the enemy clan.

Poe's sole novel, condensed -- Arthur Gordon Pym's nightmarish sea voyage of mutiny, shipwreck, starvation and stranger horrors toward the far south.

From Balzac's "L'Interdiction": a scheming wife tries to have her generous, secretive husband declared insane so she can seize his fortune.

A traveler wins big at a Paris gambling house and is offered a bed for the night -- a canopied bed built as a slow, silent machine for murder. After Wilkie Collins.

A boarding house seems merely haunted -- moaning in the attic -- until the lodgers confront an invisible, solid, living thing. From Fitz-James O'Brien's early tale of the unseen.

A period mystery after Charles Reade: a killing in old Knightsbridge and the long unraveling of who was truly responsible.

Maupassant's "Le Horla": a man's journal charts his creeping certainty that an unseen being has entered his house and is feeding on his mind.

Poe's doppelganger tale -- a dissolute man is shadowed and thwarted at every turn by a double bearing his own name, William Wilson, until the fatal confrontation.

Balzac's "A Passion in the Desert": a soldier lost in the Egyptian sands survives in a strange, doomed companionship with a panther.

Merimee's Corsican tale of honor: a boy betrays a fugitive for a silver watch, and his father exacts a terrible, unbending justice.

Edward Everett Hale's parable -- Philip Nolan curses his country in a courtroom and is condemned to spend the rest of his life at sea, never again to hear its name.

Drawn from Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities: Doctor Manette's smuggled prison manuscript, and the Bastille testimony that condemns the man his daughter loves.

A loose take on Thomas Hood -- a young man eager to learn the streets falls in with two master thieves to rob the richest house in the county, guarded only by an old man and his granddaughter.

After Samuel Johnson: a young heir's expectations, and the moral reckoning that overtakes a life built on waiting for a fortune.

Maupassant's "The Hand": a magistrate recounts an Englishman haunted -- and finally killed -- by a severed, chained hand that would not stay dead.

Charlotte Bronte's novel condensed to its gothic spine -- governess Jane Eyre, brooding Mr. Rochester and the madwoman locked in the attic at Thornfield.