The book presents a collection of mystical, mysterious, and creepy stories created by Western European and American writers of the 18th to 20th centuries. It tells of ghosts, vampires, witches, resurrected corpses, nightmarish dreams, deals with the devil, and love untainted by death, narrated by both famous authors such as A. Conan Doyle, W. Collins, E. A. Poe, P. Mérimée, R. L. Stevenson, G. Mayrink, H. P. Lovecraft, A. Bierce, as well as relatively lesser-known creators of terrifying plots like E. Wharton, E. Mitchell, E. and H. Heron, A. Edwards. Echoing each other through characters, situations, and meanings, the gothic plots of the book reveal to the reader, behind the veil of mundane reality, an irrational and terrifying world that undermines the self-assured claims to omniscience characteristic of the modern human.
