Manor and the Monk – Paperback

Two Gothic tales of love, death and the supernatural, set in an imagined Faroe Islands.

In 1885, the German writer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published two remarkable stories set among the remote islands of the North Atlantic. Although he had never visited the Faroe Islands, he imagined a world of towering cliffs, mysterious forests, dangerous seas and supernatural beings.

In Manor, two young men form a deep and tender attachment, only for tragedy to separate them. Yet death proves no barrier to their affection. A haunting tale of love and longing beyond the grave, Manor has been described by translator and scholar Michael A. Lombardi-Nash as the first known gay male vampire story.

In 2026, Manor was adapted into the feature film No Rest for the Wicked, directed by Kasper Kalle and filmed in the Faroe Islands, bringing Ulrichs’s nineteenth-century tale of love and death to the screen more than 140 years after its original publication.

In The Monk of Sumba, a mysterious mermaid inhabits the treacherous waters surrounding a lonely sea stack south of the Faroe Islands. Her beauty draws two young sailors towards a fate from which neither can escape.

Originally published in Ulrichs’s Matrosengeschichten (Sailors’ Tales), these two stories offer an unusual glimpse into nineteenth-century Gothic fiction and the imagination of a writer who knew the Faroe Islands only from afar.

This edition brings both stories together in new English translations by Svartiskli, accompanied by an original introduction exploring Ulrichs’s imagined Faroe Islands, his geographical and cultural inventions, and the enduring fascination of these curious Gothic tales.