The Red Room

About the book

The narrator volunteers to spend a night in the red room of Lorraine Castle, treating its reputation as something that a clear mind and practical precautions should settle. The elderly people who warn him do little to weaken his confidence, but the room changes the character of the test once he is alone. Wells concentrates attention on light, shadow, movement, and the labour of keeping an apparently manageable environment under observation. The narration makes assurance gradually become an effort rather than a settled condition. Its suspense does not depend on a complicated history of the building. Instead, the story explores what happens when the physical arrangements supporting confidence begin to fail, leaving the narrator to discover that declaring oneself free of superstition does not necessarily confer command over fear.

• Fear
• Reason and confidence
• Isolation

Why read it

For a concentrated Gothic experiment in which maintaining confidence becomes as demanding as confronting any possible haunting.

Short story · English text