Now that we are already in mid-September, it’s time to rejoice. October is in view, a mere three weeks away. Rejoice! The season of Halloween is close and the time for selecting especially atmospheric and chilling reads is here.
As someone whose dabbling in horror has mostly consisted of Stephen King books that have been recommended to me, I’m looking to expand my horror choices. I must say that, though I love the idea of being frightened by a novel, I’m not terribly drawn to the horror genre. I definitely want to read more and hopefully find something to truly frighten me, but as of now, I see my horror interest shifting toward a more specific type of story. Instead of looking for books to scare me outright, I’m drawn toward horror novels with more of a focus on developing a stronger sense of atmosphere and that read like more classically gothic novels.
Enter, gothic horror.
These ten books are my choices for gothic horror that I hope to read some time this season.
10 Gothic Horror Reads for Autumn
The Crucible
by Arthur Miller
“I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history,” Arthur Miller wrote of his classic play about the witch-hunts and trials in seventeenth-century Salem, Massachusetts. Based on historical people and real events, Miller’s drama is a searing portrait of a community engulfed by hysteria. In the rigid theocracy of Salem, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town’s most basic fears and suspicions; and when a young girl accuses Elizabeth Proctor of being a witch, self-righteous church leaders and townspeople insist that Elizabeth be brought to trial. The ruthlessness of the prosecutors and the eagerness of neighbor to testify against neighbor brilliantly illuminate the destructive power of socially sanctioned violence.
A classic play, this is a story it seems everyone has read at some point or another. My interest is piqued by anything related to the Salem Witch Trials, or witches in general, and this play gives me the impression of a similar tone to The Scarlet Letter, which I loved. I have high hopes for The Crucible and can’t wait to read it.
The Woman in Black
by Susan Hill
What real reader does not yearn, somewhere in the recesses of his or her heart, for a really literate, first-class thriller–one that chills the body, but warms the soul with plot, perception, and language at once astute and vivid? In other words, a ghost story written by Jane Austen? Alas, we cannot give you Austen, but Susan Hill’s remarkable Woman In Black comes as close as our era can provide. Set on the obligatory English moor, on an isolated causeway, the story has as its hero Arthur Kipps, an up-and-coming young solicitor who has come north from London to attend the funeral and settle the affairs of Mrs. Alice Drablow of Eel Marsh House. The routine formalities he anticipates give way to a tumble of events and secrets more sinister and terrifying than any nightmare: the rocking chair in the deserted nursery, the eerie sound of a pony and trap, a child’s scream in the fog, and most dreadfully–and for Kipps most tragically–The Woman In Black. The Woman In Black is both a brilliant exercise in atmosphere and controlled horror and a delicious spine-tingler–proof positive that this neglected genre, the ghost story, isn’t dead after all.
There is something so classically gothic about The Woman in Black’s premise. A ghost story in an isolated English manor, it’s a familiar story for any fan of horror. I actually watched the movie adaptation years ago, but I remember little of the plot’s specifics and I am much, much more interested in reading a story rife with atmosphere than watching a movie, so I’m looking forward to reading this one quite a bit.
The Haunting of Hill House
by Shirley Jackson
First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House: Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a “haunting”; Theodora, the lighthearted assistant; Eleanor, a friendless, fragile young woman well acquainted with poltergeists; and Luke, the future heir of Hill House. At first, their stay seems destined to be merely a spooky encounter with inexplicable phenomena. But Hill House is gathering its powers—and soon it will choose one of them to make its own.
Speaking of novels I’ve seen the adaptations of, I, like everyone else, watched the Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House and loved it. Instead of being turned off the book by knowing the plot, I’m more curious and eager to read it. In fact, by the sound of the synopsis, it sounds like it could be quite different. It won’t be a matter of comparing it to the show, but more of seeing how it matches up to my ideas of how a ghost story could be written most effectively. I have high hopes.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise, I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead…Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.
Another inclusion from Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a novel I’ve heard the name of countless times but I didn’t know what it was about for quite a while. When my intrigue at last became too much, I did what I should’ve done ages ago and read the synopsis. With that, We Have Always Lived in the Castle nabbed a spot on my TBR.
Wakenhyrst
by Michelle Paver
1906: A large manor house, Wake’s End, sits on the edge of a bleak Fen, just outside the town of Wakenhyrst. It is the home of Edmund Stearn and his family – a historian, scholar and land-owner, he’s an upstanding member of the local community. But all is not well at Wake’s End. Edmund dominates his family tyrannically, in particular daughter Maud. When Maud’s mother dies in childbirth and she’s left alone with her strict, disciplinarian father, Maud’s isolation drives her to her father’s study, where she happens upon his diary. During a walk through the local church yard, Edmund spots an eye in the undergrowth. His terror is only briefly abated when he discovers its actually a painting, a ‘doom’, taken from the church. It’s horrifying in its depiction of hell, and Edmund wants nothing more to do with it despite its historical significance. But the doom keeps returning to his mind. The stench of the Fen permeates the house, even with the windows closed. And when he lies awake at night, he hears a scratching sound – like claws on the wooden floor… Wakenhyrst is a terrifying ghost story, an atmospheric slice of gothic, a brilliant exploration of the boundaries between the real and the supernatural, and a descent into the mind of a psychopath.
This novel was introduced to me by the lovely Charlotte of Bewitching Books, Ravenous Reads some months ago. My initial intrigue and excitement upon hearing about it has not diminished in the slightest in the months since I first read the synopsis. Wakenhyrst is absolutely a novel I’m going to try to incorporate in my October reading.
White is for Witching
by Helen Oyeyemi
In a vast, mysterious house on the cliffs near Dover, the Silver family is reeling from the hole punched into its heart. Lily is gone and her twins, Miranda and Eliot, and her husband, the gentle Luc, mourn her absence with unspoken intensity. All is not well with the house, either, which creaks and grumbles and malignly confuses visitors in its mazy rooms, forcing winter apples in the garden when the branches should be bare. Generations of women inhabit its walls. And Miranda, with her new appetite for chalk and her keen sense for spirits, is more attuned to them than she is to her brother and father. She is leaving them, slowly slipping away from them. And when one dark night she vanishes entirely, the survivors are left to tell her story. “Miri I conjure you.” This is a spine-tingling tale that has Gothic roots but an utterly modern sensibility. Told by a quartet of crystalline voices, it is electrifying in its expression of myth and memory, loss and magic, fear and love.
Everything within this synopsis is intriguing. White is for Witching sounds like a very classically gothic novel, but I’m excited to see how the “modern sensibility” impacts the plot and narrative.
Melmoth the Wanderer
by Charles Robert Maturin
When a young Dublin student goes to pay his last respects to his dying uncle, he never imagines that he might chance upon a terrifying family secret. Who is the sinister old man in the portrait and why is his uncle so anxious for him to burn it? Why is the Spanish man who saves him from drowning so frightened when he hears the name Melmoth? As he digs deeper into the mystery, an intricate and blood-chilling story begins to unfold. For the past two hundred years, the accursed Melmoth has been searching desperately for an escape from the infernal bargain he once made. Melmoth has traversed the globe leaving destruction and misery in his wake, from Inquisition-era Spain to a remote island in the Indian Ocean – and there have been recent sightings of him in County Wicklow, where our narrator is still piecing the story together
Melmoth the Wanderer is a classic gothic horror tale, and one that has certainly made an impact over the generations with admirers that became staples of the genre themselves, such as Poe and Lovecraft, as well as inspiring stories such as The Picture of Dorian Gray. I’m excited to see what I’ll make of this story.
Melmoth
by Sarah Perry
For centuries, the mysterious dark-robed figure has roamed the globe, searching for those whose complicity and cowardice have fed into the rapids of history’s darkest waters-and now, in Sarah Perry’s breathtaking follow-up to The Essex Serpent, it is heading in our direction. It has been years since Helen Franklin left England. In Prague, working as a translator, she has found a home of sorts—or, at least, refuge. That changes when her friend Karel discovers a mysterious letter in the library, a strange confession and a curious warning that speaks of Melmoth the Witness, a dark legend found in obscure fairy tales and antique village lore. As such superstition has it, Melmoth travels through the ages, dooming those she persuades to join her to a damnation of timeless, itinerant solitude. To Helen it all seems the stuff of unenlightened fantasy. But, unaware, as she wanders the cobblestone streets Helen is being watched. And then Karel disappears. . . .
Inspired by the classic above, Perry’s retelling of Melmoth the Wanderer doesn’t seem like one to miss. I included another novel by Perry, The Essex Serpent, on my Must Read Atmospheric Books for Autumn and am quite intrigued by her writing, especially since she’s been described as “the contemporary master of the gothic genre.”
The Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole
The Castle of Otranto (1764) is the first supernatural English novel and one of the most influential works of Gothic fiction. It inaugurated a literary genre that will be forever associated with the effects that Walpole pioneered. Professing to be a translation of a mysterious Italian tale from the darkest Middle Ages, the novel tells of Manfred, prince of Otranto, whose fear of an ancient prophecy sets him on a course of destruction. After the grotesque death of his only son, Conrad, on his wedding day, Manfred determines to marry the bride-to-be. The virgin Isabella flees through a castle riddled with secret passages. Chilling coincidences, ghostly visitations, arcane revelations, and violent combat combine in a heady mix that terrified the novel’s first readers.
The Castle of Otranto is, as the synopsis states, one of the most famous and impactful gothic horror novels within the genre. It sounds intriguing in the familiar ways I’ve come to look for within gothic horror and I’m eager to read this classic for myself.
Carmilla
by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Carmilla is a Gothic novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and one of the early works of vampire fiction. It was first published in 1871 as a serial narrative in The Dark Blue. It tells the story of a young woman’s susceptibility to the attentions of a female vampire named Carmilla.
Although it was surprisingly difficult to find a decent synopsis that wasn’t too vague or way too detailed (I settled for too vague in favor of not revealing too many plot details), I can’t help but be intrigued by the looks of this book. A vampire story that predates Dracula, Carmilla is a must read for any fan of gothic horror.
Are you intrigued by any of these books? Have you read any of them already? Let me know what you think in the comments!
Thanks for reading,
Madison
Thanks for this interesting list. (Sorry to be so late in responding. I’m woefully behind.)
Thank YOU, Mary, for your comment! No need to apologize–I’m in a constant state of being woefully behind with everyone’s posts. I’m glad you enjoyed the list!