Frankenstein
by Mary Shelly

"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.  I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion."  A summer evening's ghost stories, lonely insomnia in a moonlit Alpine room, and a runaway imagination - fired by philosophical discussions with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley about science, galvanism, and the origins of life - conspired to produce for Mary Shelley this haunting night specter.  By morning, it had become the germ of her Romantic masterpiece, FRANKENSTEIN.

Written in 1816 when she was only nineteen, Mary Shelley's novel of "The Modern Prometheus" chillingly dramatized the dangerous potential of life begotten upon a laboratory table.  A frightening creation myth for our own time, FRANKENSTEIN remains one of the greatest horror stories ever written and is an undisputed classic of its kind.

With an Introduction by Diane Johnson.

VOLUME II
OF AN
EPIC TRILOGY.

"It can stand with the best that has been done in the English language."
Chicago Daily News

"Shimmering nets of language capture details of an epic story." The National Observer

"Peake writes with genuine wit and a clear transparency, like a Dickens intoxicated with words, drunk with his own imaginings.  Superbly evocative."
New World

"Mr. Peake throws in all his forces of dream, vision and language."
Sunday Times

From audible.com:

In the Dutch settlement of Tarry Town, New York, in a secluded glen called Sleepy Hollow, Ichabod Crane arrives to educate the children of the region. This lanky schoolmaster from Connecticut fancies the idea of marrying the beautiful Katrina Van Tassel, the 18-year-old daughter of a wealthy farmer, but there is a problem with his plan. Abraham “Brom Bones” Van Brunt, the town rowdy, has already set his heart on marrying her.

This romantic rivalry climaxes one autumn night with the appearance of the legendary Headless Horseman, allegedly the ghost of a Hessian trooper who lost his head to a cannonball during the Revolutionary War. Every night he rides through the woods to the scene of the battle in search of his head.

Since this story’s first appearance in 1820, generations of readers, young and old, have thrilled to the headless horseman galloping through the haunted woods of Sleepy Hollow. The rollicking tale of Ichabod Crane and his ill-fated courtship of Katrina Van Tassel has become a classic ghost story.

From librivox.org:

One of the first horror novels, it tells the story of Melmoth, who sells his soul so he could have an extended life. Throughout the novel, he wanders around the world in search of someone who would replace him and lift his curse. It is known for its many sub-plots, the true horror it makes one feel, and its criticism of the Catholic church. This is certainly one of the most important books of all times, quoted in countless other works, and praised by authors and critics alike. - Summary by Wikipedia and Stav Nisser.

In his last visionary satire, Peake chronicles atrocities and hilarities alike with the same deadly control that never wavers

In the third of the Titus books, the seventy-seventh earl of Gormenghast exiles himself from the mad rites of his ancestral home to wander in the world at large, and discovers that in many ways it is more strange and frightening than Gormenghast itself.

Peake's lurid vision is peopled with dark and troublesome denizens: melancholic Muzzlehatch; the fading Juno; the spicy Cheeta; a galaxy of worrying strangers that inhabit the ominous Under-River; the fearful but arrogant Titus himself.

'Everything Mervyn Peake did, he did with a passion controlled and channelled so delicately it was almost frightening to experience... [he was] an artist of wit, intelligence, humanity, boundless creative gifts and a deliberately conscious, almost aggressive simplicity' - Michael Moorcock

This volume is part of a trilogy called the Titus books (also known by some as the Gormenghast trilogy).
In reading order:
TITUS GROAN
GORMENGHAST
TITUS ALONE

From audible.com:

Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy is widely acknowledged to be, as Robertson Davies pronounced, "a classic of our age." In these extraordinary novels, Peake created a world where all is like a dream - lush, fantastical, and vivid. Yet it was incomplete. Parkinson's disease took Peake's life in 1968, depriving his fans of the fourth and final volume of the series, Titus Awakes except for a few tantalizing pages, after which his writing became indecipherable. Or so it seemed.

In January of 2010, Peake's granddaughter found four composition books in her attic. They contained the fabled Titus Awakes in its entirety. Peake had outlined the novel for his wife, Maeve Gilmore, who had at last finished Peake's masterpiece.

It starts with Titus leaving Castle Gormenghast. Peake wrote: "With every pace he drew away from Gormenghast mountain, and from everything that belonged to his home. That night, as Titus lay asleep in the tall barn, a nightmare held him." Fans of Peake will delight in this new, wonderful novel, published 100 years after his birth, every bit as thrilling and masterfully written as his famed trilogy.

Listen to the Gormenghast Trilogy.

From audible.com:

In Volume 1 of the classic Gormenghast Trilogy, a doomed lord, an emergent hero, and an array of bizarre creatures haunt the world of Gormenghast Castle. This trilogy, along with Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, reigns as one of the undisputed fantasy classics of all time. At the center of everything is the 77th Earl, Titus Groan, who stands to inherit the miles of rambling stone and mortar that form Gormenghast Castle and its kingdom.

In this first volume, the Gormenghast Castle, and the noble family who inhabits it, are introduced, along with the infant firstborn son of the Lord and Countess. Titus Groan is sent away to be raised by a wet nurse, with only a gold ring from his mother, and ordered to not be brought back until the age of six. By his christening, he learns from his much older sisters that epileptic fits are "common at his age." He also learns that they don't like his mother. And then, he is crowned, and called, "Child-inheritor of the rivers, of the Tower of Flints and the dark recesses beneath cold stairways and the sunny summer lawns. Child-inheritor of the spring breeze that blow in from the jarl forests and of the autumn misery in petal, scale, and wing. Winter's white brilliance on a thousand turrets and summer's torpor among walls that crumble..."

In these extraordinary novels, Peake has created a world where all is like a dream - lush, fantastical, vivid; a symbol of dark struggle.