Last year, literary history was made with the publication of Louisa May Alcott's thriller,A Long Fatal Love Chase. This "new" novel—denied publication in her lifetime—went on to be a national best-seller, and marked Alcott's major debut as a writer of adult fiction, complementing her already secure position as author of timeless children's classics. But this newly discovered novel was by no means Alcott's first or only attempt at sensational writing; she was a prolific writer who produced many other "blood & thunder" stories, many written and published under a pseudonym or anonymously. This collection represents the best of Alcott's adult oeuvre, starting with A Modern Mephistopheles, a dark Faustian tale inspired by A Long Fatal Love Chase. The stories in this volume display dramatic intensity and thrilling, suspenseful plots that show Alcott to be a complex and passionate writer. Readers will discover within this maelstrom of murder, deceit, obsessive desire, treachery, duplicity, and betrayal that love and honor can still conquer all. The book takes its title from the tale "A Whisper in the Dark," arguably Alcott's high-gothic masterpiece, a story of imperiled innocence. Also featured are: "The Abbot's Ghost," one of Alcott's few thrillers that employs the supernatural; "Perilous Play," a sensationalist story in which she suggests that with the appropriate stimulation—in this case hashish—even the innocent reveal a dark side; and V.V.; or Plots and Counterplots, fraught with passion and jealousy that introduces the mysterious Virginie Varens, the darkest heroine in all of her work. Throughout, Alcott's treatment of such adult themes as sexual conflict, treachery and deception, drugs and suicide results in a gripping voyage of discovery for the modern reader. As novelist Susie Mee points out in her introduction, "[Alcott] also knew that one has to explore what lies beyond that threshold. As a result, she spread her cobweb wide and caught many strange and wondrous creatures in it, some of whom are contained within these pages."
Author
People best know American writer Louisa May Alcott for Little Women (1868), her largely autobiographical novel. As A.M. Barnard: Behind a Mask, or a Woman's Power (1866) The Abbot's Ghost, or Maurice Treherne's Temptation (1867) A Long Fatal Love Chase (1866 – first published 1995) First published anonymously: A Modern Mephistopheles (1877) Philosopher-teacher Amos Bronson Alcott, educated his four daughters, Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth and May and Abigail May, wife of Amos, reared them on her practical Christianity. Louisa spent her childhood in Boston and Concord, Massachusetts, where visits to library of Ralph Waldo Emerson, excursions into nature with Henry David Thoreau, and theatricals in the barn at Hillside (now "Wayside") of Nathaniel Hawthorne enlightened her days. Like Jo March, her character in Little Women, young Louisa, a tomboy, claimed: "No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race, ... and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences...." Louisa wrote early with a passion. She and her sisters often acted out her melodramatic stories of her rich imagination for friends. Louisa preferred to play the "lurid" parts in these plays, "the villains, ghosts, bandits, and disdainful queens." At 15 years of age in 1847, the poverty that plagued her family troubled her, who vowed: "I will do something by and by. Don’t care what, teach, sew, act, write, anything to help the family; and I’ll be rich and famous and happy before I die, see if I won’t!" Confronting a society that offered little opportunity to women, seeking employment, Louisa determined "...I will make a battering-ram of my head and make my way through this rough and tumble world." Whether as a teacher, seamstress, governess, or household servant, Louisa ably found work for many years. Career of Louisa as an author began with poetry and short stories in popular magazines. In 1854, people published Flower Fables, her first book, at 22 years of age. From her post as a nurse in Washington, District of Columbia, during the Civil War, she wrote home letters that based Hospital Sketches (1863), a milestone along her literary path. Thomas Niles, a publisher in Boston, asked 35-year-old Louisa in 1867 to write "a book for girls." She wrote Little Women at Orchard House from May to July 1868. Louisa and her sisters came of age in the novel, set in New England during Civil War. From her own individuality, Jo March, the first such American juvenile heroine, acted as a living, breathing person rather than the idealized stereotype that then prevailed in fiction of children. Louisa published more than thirty books and collections of stories. Only two days after her father predeceased her, she died, and survivors buried her body in Sleepy Hollow cemetery in Concord.
