Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins' the Haunted Hotel

"Ask yourself if there is any explanation of the mystery of your own life and death."

This is another Gothic tale by the author of the two seminal classics The Moonstone and The Woman in White. Wilkie Collins's The Haunted Hotel is a book about mysterious happenings, ghost hauntings, and wicked conspiracies. The story begins when a man named Lord Montbarry has to leave his first fiancée in order to get married to Countess Narona. The newly-wed couple travel to Venice and stay in an old castle where they start to witness strange phenomena that culminate in the death of Lord Montbarry himself. Suspicions are cast on his wife yet they remain unfounded. The castle is afterward converted into a hotel and members of Montbarry's family buy some of its shares. A year later, they all come to stay at the hotel to celebrate another wedding and are haunted by the spirit of their dead sibling, which suggests that his death was not as natural as it was believed to be. Countess Narona is probably the most developed character of the novel. She is obsessed by her superstitious beliefs and thinks that she will eventually be punished for some evils that she has previously committed. Her obsessions with fate and supernatural revenge eventually make her worries come true.