E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story “The Sandman” has it all: shifting points of view, weird nocturnal experiments in the laboratory, an artificial human being and a dense web of obsessional associations that inspired Sigmund Freud’s quest for the unconscious—a century after the story was written. “The Sandman” is the opening selection in a fine collection of mostly 19th-century European and American horror fiction. Some writers included aren’t usually associated with the genre (Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, Honoré de Balzac), lending a welcome note of surprise to this well-chosen compendium of the gothic and the uncanny.
