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adjusted.
Thus, a bit happier and more knowledgeable and having less trouble with their monthlies, at least,
those two did not that year or any other year write the novels that were to be the progenitors of the
modern flood of what we call Gothic romances; thus the Bronte sisters perpetrated neither "Jane Eyre"
nor "Wuthering Heights."
A quick bounce up to the end of that century showed me that Henry James, without those books as
catalysts, never thought of his novella about the poor sweet governess who comes to the mysterious
house inhabited by ghosts Out To Get Her and the children: "The Turn of the Screw."
I had not only made the career of Boris Karloff, I had effectively stopped all those novels with
girl+castle/mansion-with-one-lighted-window on the cover. The modern Gothic was stillborn!
My work was nearly done, except for the few weeks I took off to transcribe the notes and tapes of
my conversations with Byron and Shelley.
Although we'd spent most of our time at Shelley's chalet, I called the book after Byron's, "Villa
Diodati." It hath a better ring and doth fall more trippingly off the tongue.
Published in 1954, "Villa Diodati" became the definitive work on those gentlemen. The movie starred
Robert Taylor and Tyrone Power, with George Sanders as Polidori and Grace Kelly as Mary. Though it
received far less critical acclaim than the book, and certainly nothing but the back-of-me-hand treatment
from academia, the movie was a blockbuster. The gross was enormous, of which my ten percent
was well, we needn't get too specific, need we?
The publishing firm I then launched, beginning with my own novel based on the (unwritten) "Turn of
the Screw," not only prospered, but utterly swamped another firm that was being launched at the same
time. Faced with bankruptcy, its owner/founder accepted my less than munificent terms. You know who
it was, the bastard.
Mark Ventnor is the oldest slush-pile reader in the publishing business.
As to Benjamin A. Corrick, PhD and now FRS . . . I financed his researches personally, when he
was just beginning them. He was kind enough to give me a great deal of the credit last year when he
received Honorable Mention in the Stockholm Nobel ceremonies for having proven graphically and
conclusively the utter impossibility of time travel.
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