Gothic stories for ESL students

Grislo

So, basically I need a hand finding some good gothic stories for ESL students.

They need to be as short as possibly, and reasonably easy, without being childish in nature.

They can be any flavour of gothic, so basically gothic-ish is fine, as long as they can be related to the gothic genre.

Any and all suggestions are welcome!

Esh

Can you define "gothic"? Do you mean like southern gothic? O'Connor, Faulkner, Williams?

finral

Can't go wrong with Poe. The Raven might even be a good place to start as it is not too long. His stuff might be a little complex for ESL though, depending on the ability level.

Comahawk

Hound of the Baskervilles

Grislo

Esh: Any gothic would do, really. My starting point is going to be Dracula/Frankenstein/The Blood Fetish, so I'll want to look a bit at things continuing along those lines, but I'm also looking at exploring other things considered "gothic", and newer stuff would be great too, for some added perspective.

I had considered Southern Gothic, but some of it might be on the more difficult side. Would probably want to go with Flannery O'Connor if I went that way, though.

Finral: Yeah, gonna walk them through The Raven and have them look at Tell-Tale heart. Tell-Tale Heart is pretty accessible, I think, if I provide a good glossary. Probably gonna show them the Simpsons Halloween Raven bit while we're doing that stuff.

Comahawk: Good idea, hadn't thought of that. Might do some excerpts from that, or something.

Taterskin

HP Lovecraft short stories. But that might be too complex.

Mike Danger

John Bellairs' stuff is targeted at young kids, but I don't think it's too childish.

Grislo

Lovecraft might be tricky, from a vocabulary standpoint, but I'll look into it. Haven't heard of John Bellair, so I'll have to look at him.

The_Glad_Hatter

while not exactly gothic, english was my SL (or third..) and i have some very fond memories of seeing Roald Dahl short stories in my class.
Specifically the one about the lighter and the finger-cutting. We got that when we were about 16 iirc...

edit: i mentioned this story because they're all pretty macabre. Not sure if they fit in your setting, but they certainly can get creepy...

Taterskin

The gothic literature wiki page has a good list of examples.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_literature#Post-Victorian_legacy

Though it doesn't state the length of the stories. If you get desperate, you could always look through each author's work.

Grislo

The really tricky thing right now is finding decent, not too difficult, stuff that's really short. Like, 3 pages-ish short.

People get tired of reading too many things in excerpts.

Niceguy Myeye

You know, it's not HP Lovecraft, but Lovecraft related, but Robert W. Chambers King in Yellow is a book of short stories that Lovecraft used as a basis for his Hastur character. Basically, it's a bunch of short stories all tied together by a character in the story reading a play (The King in Yellow) which is some sort of maddening blasphemy, of course.

The link is from Gutenberg.org, so you can look over it and see if some are appropriate for the class.

Grislo

That looks interesting, if not for them then for me, so thanks.