CHECK IT OUT:Classic horrors and literary monsters at the library

Now that the candy is all eaten, the slightly rotted jack-o-lanterns are hauled away, and this year’s costumes are in mothballs, it’s time to move on to the turkey and the football.

Still, it’s a shame that many of us reserve the thrills of ghosts and monsters for one day of the year. Horror fiction is part of our great literary tradition.

And in the collective consciousness that makes up our perception of horror, there are most definitely three seminal authors who stand out above all the rest. They are Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson and Bram Stoker.

Each of them in the 19th century created literary monsters who are still deeply embedded in our culture and our nightmares in the 21st.

They are, of course, Frankenstein’s creature, Mr. Hyde and Dracula.

Mary Shelley wrote “Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus” shortly after she married the man she had run away with to the Continent. (The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was married to someone else at the beginning of their affair.)

In 1816, these icons of the Romantic era were visiting another Romantic icon, Lord Byron, at his Swiss villa.

Byron suggested, during a spell of wretched weather, that they each write a ghost story to entertain themselves.

Soon after, Mary and Percy were discussing galvanism, the animating of tissue with electricity. That night Mary had a nightmare that has informed our nightmares ever since the book was published in 1818.

Nearly 70 years later, Robert Louis Stevenson had a nightmare about a man changing into a monster after taking an odd potion mixed with a white powder. When his wife, Fanny, awoke him from screaming as he slept, he chastised her. “I was having a fine bogey dream,” said the Scotsman.

It turned into the fine bogey story, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” Fanny hated the story and told Stevenson he should have written an allegory and not a mere piece of sensationalism. He tossed the first draft into the fire and rewrote it into the classic on good versus evil and moral ambiguity that still scares us silly.

Just the next year, an Irishman who was living in London as the manager to the great actor, Sir Henry Irving, also had a dream. As a child, Bram Stoker had been an invalid, bedridden with an unidentifiable illness which left the little boy with plenty of time to fantasize.

By the age of 7 he was fully recovered and eventually graduated from Trinity College, Dublin. Forced to be a civil servant by his father, he moonlighted as a theater critic, leading to Irving’s offer of a job in England.

Stoker spent many more years researching his nightmare and the middle European folklore surrounding vampires.

The novel that resulted, “Dracula,” is an epistolary novel, that is, one that is not a narrative, but tells its story through letters, diary entries, etc.

The book is an untidy patchwork of a story that for all its faults went on to be the prototype of all future visions of the creature that rises from the dead to suck our blood.

All three of these books, of course, have deeper psychological meanings that are only hinted at in the countless film versions of the tales.

But in each case, each story resonates so deeply in some part of us, that even the cheesiest movie version goes to that indefinable part of our being that understands, consciously or not, what can be truly dark about the human spirit.

Just as a footnote, the prestigious awards for outstanding horror fiction are given by the Horror Writer’s Assn. and are called the Stokers.

Interestingly, their first president, Dean Koontz, had reservations about a competition among a group that was established to support its membership.

The result is that the winners receive a superior achievement award, rather than a best of. But they are all guaranteed to scare the living daylights out of you — and not just at Halloween.