Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

"It is only your guest, sir," I called out, desirous to spare him the humiliation of exposing his cowardice further. "I had the misfortune to scream in my sleep, owing to a frightful nightmare. I'm sorry I disturbed you."
-pg 33

An odd book, made odder still by its uncanniness, that unheimlich so well explained by Freud's exegesis of E.T.A. Hoffman's story The Sandman. For it's a familiar story, familiarly told, love unrequited followed by revenge, told through the eyes of a more or less passive observer to a passive listener, describing events that are so beyond the ken of normal life as to seem mythical, taken to such extremes as to be pure fantasy. There is something of fable about it, some Grimm unlogic to the lives, loves, motivations, and hatreds of the characters, that their actions, so far removed from what one would normally expect of the Victorian English, lose their unreality and seem to become etched in stone, like the lives of heroes and villains from some bygone age where, as in the Old Testament or Shakespeare, people know what it is to sin, and know well how to hate.

Mr. Lockwood, the man to whom the story of Heathcliff's revenge is told, seems to sum it up in the quotation above: The story is a nightmare which we, the readers and the listener, have entered into; the strange doublings, the two seemingly isolated estates, the many repetitions of names, and the surly demon around which it all revolves are the product of a sentient but troubled mind, and there is no moral purpose which guides them all, just dreamy developments that compound horror and outrage; to wake up would be a relief, but we're forced to move on by that same sadistic interest that draws people to bullfights, or, more apt, perhaps, car accidents and tragedies, auto-da-fes, perp walks, and other public, if less lethal, yet more lasting humiliations.

But to say it's a nightmare does not quite grasp the horrific fascination that I felt while reading the book. Instead, it might be better to say that it convinces you in some manner beyond belief that these characters are real, and terrible to behold, and if the characters are plagued by ghostly visitations and vengeful lives and loves from beyond the grave, leering up from the moist warm earth, scratching at windows, infiltrating dreams, then the characters themselves are ghosts set loose by Emile Bronte's awful imagination, and sent, as ghosts are, to trouble your waking life, not your dreams.