The House of the Seven Gables (Hawthorne N.); Signet classics, 2010

This is a tale of a house cursed through the centuries by a man who was hanged for witchcraft—a house haunted by the ghosts of its dead and the terror of its living inhabitants. The blighted house controls the fates of four Pyncheons: Hepzibah, an elderly recluse; Clifford, her delicate brother; Phoebe, their young country cousin; and Jaffrey, a devil incarnate whose greedy quest for secret wealth is marked by murder and terrible vengeance from a restless grave.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's works are imbued with a mixture of the actual and the imaginary, and The House of the Seven Gables is an enduring example. The puritanical Jaffrey Pyncheon is the embodiment of Hawthorne's own ancestor, a judge at the Salem witch trials; the gloomy gabled house typifies Hawthorne's view of his New England ancestry. It is this masterful blending of the spiritual and the symbolic that allows Hawthorne's haunted house to stand firm where many a weaker one has fallen.

With a New Introduction by Katherine Howe and an Afterword by Brenda Wineapple.