There are some writers whose work is so seemingly dense and obtuse that no one wants to bother with them anymore, especially in a modern world full of intriguing fast reads and fairly easy-to-digest deep ones. But when it comes to a literary thirst for all things scary, if you’re tired of vampires or just want something different you may want to reconsider the classic creepiness of Nathaniel Hawthorne, where everything is not what it may seem.
If you have the patience and time to read his work slowly, Hawthorne actually makes perfect sense depending on your interpretation (and there’s always room for more than one), and often overwhelms you with the paranormal beauty and (emotional) bluntness of his stories.
In this collection there are the "standard" stories you probably remember from school (Young Goodman Brown and The Birthmark) that you’ll see with new eyes and amazement at their precocious take on human nature. And then there are the ones you may never have read like The Hollow of the Three Hills, where the reader never truly knows what is real and what is imaginary — and guilt, not necessarily evil, is the great destroyer.