Pictured: a dog sitting on me.
There’s no particular rhyme or reason here, I just went down my bookshelves. I initially tried to separate these out into “Research” and “Inspiration” categories, but to be honest, I’ve been playing about with this universe for over a decade now, so the lines are kind of blurred.
Adam Lyal’s Royal Mile (as discussed in my Oddities origin post)
The Sherlock Holmes Canon by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The works of Charles Dickens, specifically Great Expectations (Pip, you are such a dick…)
A bit of Lovecraft (“Pickman’s Model” and “The Dunwich Horror”)
Charles Addams’s New Yorker cartoons
“The Addams Family” (1991) and “Addams Family Values” (1993) (the movies, yes; the tv show, not so much for this)
The Monster Show by David J. Skal
“In Search Of” (hosted by Leonard Nimoy)
“Dark Shadows” (the original series)
“Crimson Peak” (mostly for the house, for this project)
Too many gothic novels to name
“The Shadow” (radio program, 1930s – 1950s)
“The Shadow” (1994 movie) (I wrote a whole post about my thing for the Shadow…)
The Shadow: The Freak Show Murders by Walter Gibson
Monsters, Giant, and Little Men from Mars by Daniel Cohen
The Golden Book of Mysteries by Jane Werner Watson and Sol Chaneles
Mrs. Robinson’s Disgrace by Kate Summerscale
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher by Kate Summerscale
The Victorian City by Judith Flanders
Inside the Victorian Home by Judith Flanders
The Art of the English Murder by Lucy Worsley
A Bottomless Grave and Other Victorian Tales of Terror ed. by Hugh Lamb
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman
What Jane Austen Ate and What Charles Dickens Knew by Daniel Pool
The Mile-End Murder by Sinclair McKay
Pretty Jane and the Viper of Kidbrook Lane by Paul Thomas Murphy
The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Detective Stories ed. Michael Sims
The Weird Detective Adventures of Wade Hammond, Vol. 1 by Paul Chadwick
Television Horror Movie Hosts by Elena M. Watson
Strangely Enough by C.B. Colby
Victorian London by Liza Picard
Victorian Guide to Sex: Desire & Deviance in the 19th Century by Fern Riddell
The Victorian Underworld by Donald Thomas
Heath, Medicine & Society in Victorian England by Mary Wilson Carpenter
Come Buy, Come Buy: Shopping and the Culture of Consumption in Victorian Women’s Writing by Krista Lysack
The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskill
The Night-Land by William Hope Hodgson
Carnacki, The Ghost Finder by William Hope Hodgson
Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and The New Eroticism by Deborah Lutz
Penny Dreadfuls: Sensational Tales of Terror compiled by Stefan Dziemianowicz
Le Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
Casting the Runes by M.R. James
Late Victorian Gothic Tales ed. Roger Luckhurst
Lore (podcast & books) by Aaron Mahnke
“Strange Company” (blog)