For today’s hardened audiences, "A Night of Terror" may fail to terrify, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an entertaining read. Gothic horror--be it in teen vampire novels or Poe’s short stories—seem to captivate audiences in every generation. It reminds us that the world is a scary place, but even as it reminds us that there are monsters it also gives us hope that monsters can be beaten.

In "A Night of Terror," the monsters are simultaneously grotesque and all too human. The trappings of the gothic trope appear in spades: a dark and stormy night, a masked villain, a beautiful woman, and an everyday heroine. In this case, the heroine is a respectable midwife called away to help with a mysterious labor. Despite the incompleteness of the story, or perhaps because of it, all of the slightly cliché elements come together in a way that is bizarre and unsettling. Like many gothic novels, it contains within it something unheimlich. After all, what is more immediate, more domestic, than a birth? And what more perverse than the death of an infant? Even incomplete, the tale is arresting. The ending in the editor’s note, while enlightening, isn’t necessary to enjoy the story. The incompleteness provides a puzzle for the reader, who must guess the plot without being given much in the way of backstory or even motivations.

Entertainment aside, the tale gives hints of a world that was more real and far more sordid than the fantasia of the story. The story takes place in a world where illegitimacy could destroy a woman and a child, though not always as literally as in the story. The masked “villain,” while seemingly cruel, is a product of a system that left few options for the product of “sin.” And yet, the story clearly shows the depravity lies not in the child but in the destruction of the innocent.

Perhaps as interesting as the piece itself is the fact the novel it was to be a part of was never published. This publication of the story was aborted for some reason, and it lies forgotten, nestled inside the pages of a periodical. Far from the dry essays or poems about trees, “A Night of Terror” is a choice morsel of the macabre that today’s readers would find easy to indulge in.