To Be Read at Dusk

Charles Dickens's To Be Read at Dusk turns a winter gathering into a chilling tale of coincidence, dread, and the uncanny. On the Great St. Bernard pass, five couriers trade skeptical jokes about ghosts until the Genoese courier begins a story stranger than any apparition. He had once guided a young English bride and her husband to an old palazzo on the Riviera, where the bride was haunted by a recurring dream of a dark, secretive man whose face seemed destined to appear among the house's portraits. That unease deepens when Signor Dellombra arrives: urbane, polished, and disturbingly familiar to the bride's vision. Though her husband urges her to treat him as an ordinary guest, the fear never truly lifts. The tension builds through a bright summer shadowed by suspicion, then erupts during Carnival in Rome, when the bride vanishes and Dellombra is seen carrying off a terrified English woman. Told with gothic atmosphere and mounting suspense, the story leaves its mystery unresolved and its ending steeped in menace. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.