Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is an outstanding writer of the Victorian era, during which he was often called the “Irish Wilkie Collins” and the “Irish Edgar Poe,” the author of many Gothic stories, novellas and novels that survived temporary oblivion at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries, and then re-gaining popularity among new generations of readers. On the pages of the collection “In a Glass Darkly” (1872), which became Le Fanu’s last book published during his lifetime, there are stories about otherworldly retribution for an old sin - and a story about an obsessive obsession that drives a respectable man in the street crazy, a romantic plot about ardent love and a mysterious room – and the legend of the vampire seducer, which predates Bram Stoker’s Dracula by a quarter of a century. These extraordinary incidents, in which the obvious or hidden influence of supernatural forces can be seen, are narrated by the secretary of Dr. Martin Hesselius, a psychiatrist and one of the first “occult detectives” in the history of literature...