This was a fabulous read, I would really recommend it to anyone who is reasonably well read and interested in late-Victorian Decadent horror fiction and art. Emphasis on well read. I was constantly putting the book down to look up some story or person I'd never heard of but was expected to know, and yet I chalk this up to myself needing to brush up on my Victorian knowledge than any fault in Navarette's writing. Her thesis, essentially, is that the "fin de siecle" culture of decadence in late Victorian horror fiction is the main precursor to the modernist mode of the early twentieth century, and her case is convincing. Besides, any book that ends by quoting T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland is an amazing book in my opinion.