The House by the Churchyard by Sheridan Le Fanu

I picked this up on a whim at the library, expecting some grade A Victorian creepiness (seeing as Le Fanu is the author of the delightfully eerie Carmilla and 'The Green Tea'), and I am always ready to be impressed by Victorian creepiness. It actually turned out to be a fairly satirical 'ghost story', with extensive, almost Dickensian observations of country life in the eighteenth century. The two romantic plots (which are very sappy and full of flourishes) are pushed into the background, and most of the novel is dominated by accounts of squabbling, gossiping, competitions and pratfalls of various characters, many of whom are stereotypical ones, such as The Drinking Priest and The Cowardly Cavalier. The enigmatic 'dark stranger' at the focus of the mystery of the novel, Mervyn, seemed at first to show great promise as a Byronic hero, but he appears very infrequently, and really isn't the centre of anything at all. Basically, I wanted to have my creepy Victorian Gothic novel with a mysterious and magnetic hero, but Le Fanu wouldn't let me have my fun.