Thirteen Gothic stories created by English and American writers of the 19th and 20th centuries introduce the reader to a world where the ordinary and the supernatural go hand in hand, absolute evil coexists with ironic mockery of it, and careless seekers of encounters with the unknown constantly find themselves on the verge of life and death. Edith Wharton, Montague Rhodes James, Edward Frederic Benson, William Fryer Harvey and other masters of the genre tell about long-standing family secrets and family curses, about deals with the devil and ancient artifacts that have not lost their sinister properties, about vague shadows in dimly lit interiors and trapped in a difficult situation with ghosts... All translations included in the collection are published for the first time, some stories have never been published in Russian before.