The Red Room

Very unlike Wells in its total break-up with the world of sci-fi literature, this brilliant short story combines the Gothic traditions of horror with the psychological terrors that had glided into Man's notice by the turn of the century on account of the era's alienists, and the increasing interest harbored in regard to psychology and psychoanalysis.The latter field had come into being with the sweeping effect of a wildfire under the administration of Freud as soon as his first works were published in the 1890s. The Red Room follows the Freudian school of thought, and builds upon it an incredible amount of suspense culminating in an unexpected, yet very satisfying manner. Set upon the task of investigating an allegedly haunted room in a vacant castle, where a young duke had recently died succumbing to apoplexy, the nameless narrator of the tale guides his reader one step at a time towards his own fears. While the shadows of what had seemed to him at first crouching men failed to numb his logical reasoning, the fear of the dark had soon conquered, and the rest of the narrative can easily fit in as a set of hallucinations reported by a terrorized unreliable narrator. It is fear itself that had killed the young duke, lamed the narrator, and turned him out of the haunted room. In a word, ghosts haunt are thoughts not our rooms.