Recently I was reading Maggie Kilgour's The Rise of the Gothic Novel, in which she discusses Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a "quintessential" Gothic novel, and in fact a story with metaphorical resonance for the genre as a whole. While I would never denigrate the quality (and certainly not the influence) of Frankenstein, personally I feel it's actually more atypical than quintessential: more a work of proto-science fiction, more interested in philosphical musing than the kind of emotional ambience found in more representative Gothic works. Perversely, (and what could be more fitting for a representative Gothic work than perversity?) these obscure and fragmented short novels of Percy's seem more quintessentially Gothic to me than Mary's much more famous novel.
I first came across reference to them in H.P. Lovecraft's Supernatural Horror in Literature, where he makes fleeting mention of them as the poet's "schoolboy effusions." This is fairly accurate, since the books were originally published in 1810 and 1811, while Shelley was still in his teens. This may explain why the book contains some of the most emotionally overwrought language and plotting I have ever read. In these tales, love, or at least lust and jealousy, brings out the worst in everyone, and it's all described in the most feverish language that seems humanly possible. Opening the book at random one finds delightful tidbits such as: "the ferocious Matilda seized Julia's floating hair, and holding her back with fiend-like strength, stabbed her in a thousand places; and, with exulting pleasure, again and again buried the dagger to the hilt in her body, even after all remains of life were annihilated." (89) First of all, there's the Argento-esque delight in graphic carnage, the odd Coleridgean echo of "floating hair," and the fact that this is the second use of "fiend-like" to describe Matilda in two pages. (On the previous, "her eyes scintillated with a fiend-like expression." Ah, scintillation!) But my favorite part is the melodramatic exaggeration of "stabbed her in a thousand places." A thousand! How long would that take?
Even more entertaining is the fact that eyeballs are to these two short works what spitting is to All the Pretty Horses. Considering that Shelley is infamous for claiming to have a vision, during the ghost story session at Byron's Villa Deodati, of a woman with eyeballs where her nipples should be, you have to kind of wonder about him. These works are filled with tears and gazes, and a character's death is described by saying "those affection-beaming orbs were now closed in the never-ending slumber of the grave." (153) But it's the number of direct references to eyeballs that really sets this book apart. (Click here for Eyeball Mania)
This inaugural selection is, unfortunately, out of print, but copies can be acquired from online used book stores like Alibris or Powells, if you're willing to do some research and have some patience. My edition is the Oxford University Press, published in Oxford, England, in 1986.