The Cavern of Death
A 1794 Gothic chapbook romance of murder revealed in a haunted forest cavern, published anonymously and never attributed.
- Original byline
- Anonymous
- Published
- Date not recorded
- Form
- Other works
- Authorship
- Still unknown
- Reason for anonymity
- Unrecorded
- Copyright
- Public domain
The authorship story
The Cavern of Death: A Moral Tale appeared in 1794 at the flood tide of English Gothic, a short romance in which supernatural horrors in a German forest cavern expose an old murder and restore an inheritance. It was reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic and abridged into chapbooks, always without an author. No attribution has entered the documented record. Like The Animated Skeleton it represents the anonymous bulk of the Gothic boom, fiction produced for circulating libraries by writers whose names publishers never thought worth printing.
Questions readers ask
Who wrote The Cavern of Death?
Nobody knows. No author for The Cavern of Death has been identified in the documented record.
Can I read The Cavern of Death for free?
Yes. The Cavern of Death is in the public domain and the full text is free to read at the Internet Archive.
Related works
- Still unknown
The Animated Skeleton
A 1798 Gothic novel published anonymously by the Minerva Press, in which apparent supernatural terror hides human machinery. Its author was never identified.
- Still unknown
Amduat
An ancient Egyptian netherworld book describing the sun god's journey through the twelve hours of night. Like all Egyptian funerary literature, it names no author.
- Still unknown
Book of Caverns
An ancient Egyptian netherworld book depicting the sun god's passage over six caverns of the underworld. No author is recorded in the tradition.
- Still unknown
Book of the Dead
The ancient Egyptian collection of funerary spells guiding the dead through the afterlife. Tradition associates such texts with the god Thoth; no historical author exists in the record.