Uncle Silas

Uncle Silas is a Victorian Gothic mystery-thriller novel by the Irish writer J. Sheridan Le Fanu. It is notable as an early example of the locked room mystery subgenre. It is not a novel of the supernatural (despite a few creepily ambiguous touches), but does show a strong interest in the occult and in the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish scientist, philosopher and Christian mystic. Like many of Le Fanu's novels, it grew out of an earlier short story, "A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess" (1839), which he also published as "The Murdered Cousin" in the 1851 collection Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery. (WIKIPEDIA)