Midnight
Transported by sixpenny `` blue books '' and the many volumed novels in the Brentford circulating library , Shelley 's imagination fled joyously to that land of unlikelihood , where the earth yawns with bandits ' caverns inhabited by desperadoes with bloody daggers , where the air continually resounds with the shrieks and groans of melancholy spectres , and where the pale moon ever gleams on dark and dreadful deeds . He had reached that stage of human development when fairies , elves , witches and dragons begin to lose their charm , when the gentle quiver of fear excited by an ogre , who is inevitably doomed to be slain at the last , no longer suffices . At the approach of adolescence with its surging emotions and quickening intellectual life , there awakens a demand for more thrilling incidents , for wilder passions and more desperate crimes , and it is at this period that the `` novel of terror '' is likely to make its strongest appeal . Youth , with its inexperience , is seldom tempted to bring fiction to the test of reality , or to scorn it on the ground of its improbability , and we may be sure that Shelley and his cousin , Medwin , as they hung spellbound over such treasures as _ The Midnight Groan , The Mysterious Freebooter _ , or _ Subterranean Horrors _ did not pause to consider whether the characters and adventures were true to life . They desired , indeed , not to criticise but to create , and in the winter of 1809-1810 united to produce a terrific romance , with the title _ Nightmare _ , in which a gigantic and hideous witch played a prominent part . After reading Schubert 's _ Der Ewige Jude _ , they began a narrative poem dealing with the legend of the Wandering Jew , -LSB- 91 -RSB- who lingered in Shelley 's imagination in after years , and whom he introduced into _ Queen Mab , Prometheus Unbound _ , and _ Hellas _ . The grim and ghastly legends included in `` Monk '' Lewis 's _ Tales of Terror _ -LRB- 1799 -RRB- and _ Tales of Wonder _ -LRB- 1801 -RRB- fascinated Shelley ; -LSB- 92 -RSB- and the suggestive titles _ Revenge _ ; -LSB- 93 -RSB- _ Ghasta , or the Avenging Demon _ ; -LSB- 94 -RSB- _ St. Edmund 's Eve _ ; -LSB- 95 -RSB- _ The Triumph of Conscience _ from the _ Poems by Victor and Cazire _ -LRB- 1810 -RRB- , and _ The Spectral Horseman _ from _ The Posthumous Poems of Margaret Nicholson _ -LRB- 1810 -RRB- , all prove his preoccupation with the supernatural .