Written By: Rylee Thomas
Like many book-lovers, I read across genres. I love epic fantasies, but sometimes I’m in the mood for literary fiction. Sometimes an autobiography sounds fun, and you can always talk me into a good romance.
My favorite genre, however, will always be gothic horror. I love the way it combines fear and romance in a way that makes me question my reality, shining an analytic light on present-day anxieties through spooky symbolism. The gloomy, haunted landscapes of these stories evoke danger, but also a sense of freedom. Where conventional horror focuses on the spectacle of fear, gothic horror is more interested in cryptic allegories. The horror emerges less from the ghosts and monsters (though ghosts and monsters are exciting in their own right), and more from the fearful merging of the past and present these creatures embody. The monster, ghost, or haunted house represents repressed feelings, such as grief, loss, pride, desire, fear, or guilt.
To me, the best scary gothic monsters represent guilt. Maybe it’s a personal guilt over a crime committed, or an injustice done. Maybe it’s a more societal guilt, over something we do wrong as human beings. Regardless, in this very cool genre, these feelings are personified, taking the shape of monsters or hallucinations that drive a character mad. The haunting symbol mirrors the mental landscape of the protagonists, giving the story a digestible metaphor to diagram the trauma of being human, or, especially, being a woman. The haunted house becomes symbolic of entrapment in the domestic sphere, while evil twins become funhouse mirrors for female anger against patriarchal oppression.
Now that I’ve said my piece about how unique and wonderful gothic horror can be, I’m excited to give you some book recommendations. I’m writing my own gothic horror novel for my Honors thesis this year, and, someday, you’ll see my own atmospherically scary book on the shelf. For now, though, I’m eager to spotlight the books that inspired me the most in my writing process.
First, we have the classics. The powerhouse of American gothic fiction is Shirley Jackson, who wrote two masterclasses of the genre, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. The Haunting of Hill House has a distinctive music to its narrative voice, and the subtle psychological unraveling of the main character, Eleanor, tingles with constant unease. We Have Always Lived in the Castle follows Merricat Blackwood, a peculiar young girl and a town pariah, who lives in an isolated mansion as the aftereffects of her family’s mysterious death condemns her and her older sister to persecution.
On the British side of things, Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, written, respectively, by Emily and Charlotte Brontë, capture the romance of gothic horror. These are two very different books, but both focus on class, gender, and symbols of love and wild nature annihilated by civilization. Additionally, contrary to what you might expect, gothic literature pairs beautifully with humor. Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey is a self-aware spoof of gothic fiction with a thriller fangirl for a heroine.
Now for the modern recommendations. A lot of the horror we experience today comes from the effects of abuse of power from privileged groups. In 2024, we as a society are increasingly aware of the horrors inflicted on marginalized populations throughout our history. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, The Hacienda by Isabela Cañas, and White is for Witching by Helen Oyeyemi are postcolonial, feminist subversions of traditional gothic fiction. The demons at the center of these stories are not only ghosts and haunted houses, but racism and sexism.
One of my favorite fairytale-esque, female-centric stories is House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland, which combines the beauty in femininity with disturbing strangeness, focusing on sisterhood, mirrored realities, and dark doubles. The Gathering Dark is an anthology of folk horror featuring some of the best young adult authors of the 2020s, such as Chloe Gong and Courtney Gould, the latter of whom also wrote The Dead and the Dark, a young adult gothic novel about queer girls and missing teens in rural, empty spaces.
Campy sensationalism, nostalgia, and creepiness take center stage in the novels of Riley Sager and Grady Hendrix. The Only One Left and Home Before Dark are more traditional haunted house stories, but my favorite of Sager’s novels is The House Across the Lake, the twist-filled story of a widowed actress trying to escape bad press in a secluded Vermont cabin. Hendrix writes novels that focus on the oppressive tendencies of faith, domesticity, and gender that define the southern gothic. My favorite Hendrix book is My Best Friend’s Exorcism, a Stranger Things-like friendship story about two tween girls and a demonic possession set in the 1980s. Honorable mentions, however, include The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, which has been called Steel Magnolias meets Dracula, and How to Sell a Haunted House, which is one of the best books about complicated brother-sister relationships I’ve ever read.
Happy reading!