Lilith: A Romance

Mr Vane, a young man living in his ancestral house, follows the ghostly old librarian, Mr Raven, through a mirror into a strange other world, a region of the dead and the not-yet-born, where he meets the Little Ones, wild children who never grow up, and the beautiful, terrible Lilith, Adam's first wife, who rules the city of Bulika as a vampire princess. Vane must find the way back, and learn what it means to die into true life.

George MacDonald published this dark, dreamlike fantasy in 1895, near the end of his life, and it influenced C. S. Lewis, Tolkien and many later writers of fantasy. Read Phantastes and At the Back of the North Wind.