Alexandre Dumas - Os Mil e Um Fantasmas

A young writer named Alexandre Dumas, along with others, witnesses a heinous crime. Later brought together, each person recounts the most fantastic story they have lived or heard.
Published in 1849, The Thousand and One Ghosts is a novel in short stories and one of Dumas's few works to deal with the fantastic genre. In it, the author uses the device of stories within stories, giving the whole a stamp of verisimilitude through his presence as narrator and character.

Like The Arabian Nights, at that time then "translated" by Antoine Galland, with enormous success throughout cultured Europe, Dumas wrote this novel with the collaboration of two other writers from his circle: Paul Lacroix and Paul Bocage. Each story delves into a theme or type of fantastic literature that constitutes a showcase of the genre, according to the standards of the first half of the 19th century.

For the reader of our day, these stories are close to what we now consider fantastic or horror. Ghosts, the undead, or vampires appear and constitute a veritable catalog of the fantasy genre of the time.