A bizarre work whose labyrinthine plot defies summary, Horrid Mysteries (1796) recounts the experiences of Don Carlos and his friend, the Marquis of G******, who become entangled in the web of a secret society bent on world domination. As the heroes flee from place to place across Europe, the agents of this dark confederacy, seemingly possessed of supernatural powers, are always at their heels-and death lies around every corner! Unavailable for nearly 50 years, this unabashedly lurid Gothic novel written by an enigmatic German who styled himself the Marquis of Grosse and Marquis of Pharnusia returns to print at last as the seventh and final reissue in Valancourt’s series of the rare Gothic novels mentioned in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. This edition includes a new introduction by Prof. Allen W. Grove.

A strange, wild work, dealing unashamedly in the supernatural, written with a lurid power … the most defiantly fantastic of any novel of the period … I am aware of no Gothic novel of the period that can rival it. - Michael Sadleir, The Northanger Novels: A Footnote to Jane Austen

Remarkable for its sombre and fearful power, a vehemence which grips the reader and holds him fast. - Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest

Certainly no novel to survive from the Gothic period is stranger, darker, or more precipitately irrational. - Prof. Frederick S. Frank, The First Gothics