Other novelists, contemporary with the Brontes, revel in terror for its own sake.  Wilkie Collins weaves elaborate plots of hair-raising events.  The charm of The Moonstone and the Woman in White is independent of character or literary finish.  It consists in the unravelling of a skilfully woven fabric.  Le Fanu, who resented the term “sensational” which was justly applied to his works, plays pitilessly on our nerves with both real and fictitious horrors.  He, like Wilkie Collins, made a cult of terror.  Their literary descendants may perhaps be found in such authors as Richard Marsh or Bram Stoker, or Sax Rohmer.  In Bram Stoker’s Dracula the old vampire legend is brought up to date, and we are held from beginning to end in a state of frightful suspense.  No one who has read the book will fail to remember the picture of Dracula climbing up the front of the castle in Transylvania, or the scene in the tomb when a stake is driven through the heart of the vampire who has taken possession of Lucy’s form.  The ineffable horror of the “Un-Dead” would repel us by its painfulness, if it were not made endurable by the love, hope and faith of the living characters, particularly of the old Dutch doctor, Van Helsing.  The matter-of-fact style of the narrative, which is compiled of letters, diaries and journals, and the mention of such familiar places as Whitby and Hampstead, help to enhance the illusion.

The motive of terror has often been mingled with other motives in the novel as well as in the short tale.  In unwinding the complicated thread of the modern detective story, which follows the design originated by Godwin and perfected by Poe, we are frequently kept to our task by the force of terror as well as of curiosity.  In The Sign of Four and in The Hound of the Baskervilles, to choose two entirely different stories, Conan Doyle realises that darkness and loneliness place us at the mercy of terror, and he works artfully on our fears of the unknown.  Phillips Oppenheim and William Le Queux, in romances which have sometimes a background of international politics, maintain our interest by means of mystifications, which screw up our imagination to the utmost pitch, and then let us down gently with a natural but not too obvious explanation.  A certain amount of terror is almost essential to heighten the interest of a novel of costume and adventure, like The Prisoner of Zenda or Rupert of Hentzau, or of the fantastic, exciting romances of Jules Verne.  Rider Haggard’s African romances, She and King Solomon’s Mines, belong to a large group of supernatural tales with a foreign setting.  They combine strangeness, wonder, mystery and horror.  The ancient theme of bartering souls is given a new twist in Robert Hichens’ novel, The Flames.  E.F.  Benson, in The Image in the Sand, experiments with Oriental magic.  The investigations of the Society for Psychical Research gave a new impulse