First published 2020
Jan Kostka assembles five interconnected stories that follow plague through literary history. The collection opens with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto from 1764, the work that launched Gothic fiction. William Beckford's Vathek follows, drawing from both Walpole and Arabian Nights to create its own dark tale. Mary Shelley's The Last Man carries the Gothic tradition into new territory, imagining a world after catastrophe strikes humanity. Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death shows a society's futile attempts to escape apocalyptic forces. Jack London's The Scarlet Plague concludes the sequence, depicting a global pandemic that overwhelms human civilization. Each story builds on those before it, creating a chain of influence across nearly two centuries. The collection reveals how plague has served as both literal threat and metaphor for societal collapse, showing writers grappling with humanity's vulnerability to forces beyond control.
Genres: literary-fiction, historical-fiction, 20th-century, 19th-century, gothic, apocalyptic
Vibes: dark, emotional, thought-provoking
Tropes: chain-of-influence, humanity-vulnerability
Setting: Arabia, Otranto
Period: 1764, 19th-Century, 20th-Century
528 pages · Paperback · Zmok Books