The Spider — Hanns Heinz Ewers

The Spider is perhaps the strangest and most disturbing of all the stories written by Hanns Heinz Ewers, the German author and occultist who also wrote novels such as Alraune before falling victim to the Nazis. Like Alraune, The Spider is the story of a femme fatale whose charms seem to derive from more than natural sources; it has been described as one of the best psychological horror stories ever written.