Books like Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell

If Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell stayed with you, these share its feel: morality, dread and awe. Each comes with a real page, so you can tell in a minute.

About Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell · Dante Alighieri

1.Frankenstein

Mary Shelley, 1818

Also morality and grief. A young scientist makes life and then cannot face what he has made. Told in nested voices, it asks who owes what to whom, and why ambition so often ends in solitude.

“But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans.
2.Beowulf

Beowulf poet, 1000

Also awe and dread. A hall under nightly siege, a stranger who volunteers to face the thing in the dark, and a poet who makes boasting, grief and fate sound like weather. The oldest English epic.

He often permitteth the mood-thought of man of The illustrious lineage to lean to possessions, 80 Allows him earthly delights at his manor, A high-burg of heroes to hold in his keeping, Maketh portions of earth-folk hear him, And a wide-reaching kingdom so that, wisdom failing him, He himself is unable to reckon its boundaries; 85 He liveth in luxury, little debars him, Nor sickness nor age, no treachery-sorrow Becloudeth his spirit, conflict nowhere, No sword-hate, appeareth, but all of the world doth Wend as he wisheth; the worse he knoweth not, 90 Till arrant arrogance inward pervading, Waxeth and springeth, when the warder is sleeping, The guard of the soul: with sorrows encompassed, Too sound is his slumber, the slayer is near him, Who with bow and arrow aimeth in malice.
3.The Odyssey

Homer, -800

Also dread. The first great story about a journey home — and every stop along the way is a good reason to give up.

“I spake; Achilles quickly answered me:—‘Noble Ulysses, speak not thus of death,As if thou couldst console me. I would beA laborer on earth, and serve for hireSome man of mean estate, who makes scant cheer,Rather than reign o’er all who have gone downTo death. Speak rather of my noble son,Whether or not he yet has joined the warsTo fight among the foremost of the host.
4.Hamlet

William Shakespeare, 1603

Also grief and dread. A prince in mourning delays, dissembles, and thinks too much, while a court watches every move. Read for the language, stay for the recognitions.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to sufferThe slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;No more; and by a sleep to say we endThe heart-ache and the thousand natural shocksThat flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummationDevoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;For in that sleep of death what dreams may comeWhen we have shuffled off this mortal coil,Must give us pause: there’s the respectThat makes calamity of so long life;
5.Paradise Lost

John Milton, 1667

Also awe and grief. A blind poet turns the fall of Adam and Eve into an epic of free will, ambition, and married love, and gives the devil its most persuasive voice.

What matter where, if I be still the same,And what I should be, all but less than heWhom thunder hath made greater? Here at leastWe shall be free; the Almighty hath not builtHere for his envy, will not drive us hence:Here we may reign secure, and in my choiceTo reign is worth ambition though in Hell:Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.
6.Dracula

Bram Stoker, 1897

Also dread and death. A solicitor's business trip, a seaside storm and a doctor's case notes, told through diaries, letters and telegrams so that dread reads like found evidence.

What I saw was the Count’s head coming out from the window. I did not see the face, but I knew the man by the neck and the movement of his back and arms. In any case I could not mistake the hands which I had had so many opportunities of studying. I was at first interested and somewhat amused, for it is wonderful how small a matter will interest and amuse a man when he is a prisoner. But my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings. At first I could not believe my eyes.
7.The Castle of Otranto

Horace Walpole, 1764

Also dread and death. A castle, an enormous helmet fallen from nowhere, and a tyrant with a guilty bloodline: the 1764 novel that invented gothic fiction and is still genuinely strange, funny and frightening.
8.Oedipus Rex

Sophocles, -429

Also dread. A plague-stricken city, a king who promises to find a murderer, and an investigation that keeps turning back on the investigator.
9.The Law of the Four Just Men

Edgar Wallace, 1921

Also morality. Four self-appointed vigilantes hunt the criminals the law can't touch—with wit, disguises, and a moral arithmetic that keeps the reader guessing.
10.Tusculan Disputations

Cicero, -45

Also morality and death. Out of power, Cicero argues himself out of the fear of death and grief — five afternoons of Roman argument at its wittiest and most consoling.
11.The Count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas, 1844

Also morality and grief. A young sailor is betrayed on his wedding day and spends fourteen years in prison. Then he returns, rich and unrecognisable, to dismantle the lives of the men who put him there.
12.Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad, 1899

Also dread and awe. A riverboat captain in the Congo tells of a journey that strips away the idea of civilization, and of the eloquent man he went to find.