A lovesick count and the ghost of his brutalized servant...a serial killer who defies death...a house with a violent mind of its own and another that holds within its peeling walls a grotesque secret. Here are witches who feast on faces, changeling rites of passage, a venerable vampire contemplating his end, and a fanged brat who drains the patience of a bumbling teenage boy. Here, too, are a flamboyant young novelist in search of a subject more compelling than his own eerie existence, and the daughter of a sorcerer fighting to free her lover, and her will, from sinister bonds. Enter the world of gothic, a celebration of the literary form made famous by such writers as Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe.