So hear me out: I think that modern Gothic fiction depends on not just rehashing old Gothic tropes, but including elements from the modern Goth subculture.
Reviewing recent novels that are labeled strictly as Gothic leads to a certain paucity of choices, a sense of the same stories being told over and over out of nostalgia; fitting a Goth lens over more recent works (whether or not they’re labeled as “Gothic”) reveals a richer trend.
I made a program of reading all the traditionally Gothic and Goth-y novels I could get my hands on, starting a few years ago, and chewed my way through quite a few. I haven’t read as many of the most recent ones (it’s a nice stack to try to keep up with, which pleases me), but I can speak to a lot of Gothic fiction’s roots and branches now.
This list contains written works including graphic novels and manga, fiction and nonfiction, and a smattering of poetry. It only includes books that I’ve read and liked and can recommend.
You are advised to read at your own risk; some of these books are stomach-churningly dark.
A Brief History of Gothic
People will tell you that the all things Gothic point back to the Goth peoples, that is, Germanic tribes from the 4th century C.E. who invaded Rome. Which, okay, sure, but it’s mostly a smartass thing that people say because they like mocking the modern-day Goth subculture.
Then in the late 12th century, that is, the Middle Ages, people started building ornate buildings with pointed arches at the top. (Greco-Roman architecture, the dominant style at the time, has rounded arches.) People started to say that the new architecture was “Gothic architecture” because it overthrew the Romans.
Which is to say that smartasses have been throwing around the term “Goth” longer than you’d think.
At any rate, during the Middle Ages, the term Gothic became a more general symbol for the decay, collapse, and overthrow of a society.
Gothic fiction started in 1764 with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, based on a nightmare the author had while at his Strawberry Hill House in London—a Gothic revivalist house so famous that it inspired its own, somewhat McMansion-ish, strain of Gothic architecture.
Since then, Gothic fiction has wandered through the centuries, becoming more or less popular, and has continued through to modern-day fiction. It has traveled through time, genre, and media and became more than just a genre of architecture (or fiction) but an aesthetic involving references to creepiness, decay, corruption, and death.
(Yes, I know it’s more complex than that, but at least that much holds true.)
What is Goth subculture?
Modern Goth subculture developed during the Seventies and Eighties via Goth music, a branch off the larger tree of punk. (So if you see punk elements creeping into your Goth, that’s where they came from.) Goth are also strong elements of Glam and New Wave music.
Gothiness has lots of different flavors now, from traditional and Victorian Goths to Bubble Goth, where wearing black isn’t even required.
What holds Goth subcultures together seems to be the understanding that human nature and human culture have creepy, corrupt, and/or decaying elements to them, and that those elements can be enjoyed and celebrated; that it is better to be an outsider, a calm observer of mainstream culture rather than a wholehearted participant; that ambiguity, liminality, absurdity, and paradox are markers of authenticity—a perfectly crafted “reality” is always hiding something that can be used against you; and that in the end, if all goes well, death awaits us all.
What makes something Gothic fiction in modern times?
I like to joke that Gothic fiction is a game of “spot the asshole,” and while I don’t think I’m wrong, it’s slightly more complex than that.
Here are my assumptions of what makes a story Gothic for the purposes of this list:
Stories created as a response to corruption and decay in society—that is, the concept of death as larger than the death of one person,
Where the corruption, death, and decay are externalized and made overwhelming through location, atmosphere, and/or use of the supernatural,
As well as through individual characters (for example, via hidden madness and/or evil), and
Where the point-of-view characters are generally unhealthy or uncertain about the situation because of distorted narratives about what’s really going on, and
Where the point-of-view characters survive if they face difficult truths and self-destruct if they do not; survival may be ambiguous rather than clear-cut.
There are often other trappings (like ghosts, castles/monasteries, slow pacing, general atmospheric gloominess/storms/darkness, or a contrived plot about helpless women in nightgowns) that are used to help define Gothic fiction, but I don’t think they’re truly necessary.
But then again, while I don’t define myself strictly as a Goth, I grew up listening to Joy Division and Sisters of Mercy and hoarding black jeans and sardonic t-shirts, so I’m biased: this is definitely a list of books viewed through a Gothic subculture lens.
Genre or Aesthetic?
“Gothics” used to be a genre on its own that has become Romantic Suspense these days. But today “Gothic” is more of an aesthetic that can be used across genres.
Gothic horror, Gothic romance, Southern Gothics (and other regional Gothics, like Western Gothic or Appalachian Gothic), Gothic sci-fi and fantasy…it’s a flavor that can be added to almost anything.
And that’s what this list reflects: not genre per se, but a focus on core truths about the collapse of society, emotionally resonant settings and atmosphere, hidden evil or madness, distorted narratives, and uncertain survival.
Side note: one of the things I realized early on while writing this list was that traditional Gothics are very white-centric, and that any definition I used that locked me into books mainly by white Western writers was probably a bad definition.
The List
I don’t want to screw around with making the list consistent by titles or authors. I’m going to list this by authors, books, and/or characters at will.
If you’re familiar at all with the Gothic genre, there are going to be many notable exclusions of books that were influential in the creation and development of Gothic fiction but that I found a slog. Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). The Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis. Melmouth the Wanderer (1820). All of Ann Radcliffe. Also? The Marquis de Sade was just dull and icky, not merely an observer of corruption but a proponent and participant.
I left ’em out.
William Shakespeare. I know Gothics are supposed to start with Walpole (I even said so above), but the Bard has a solid Gothic streak by my standards. My favorite Gothic-aesthetic tales of his are Hamlet (1600), Macbeth (1606), and King Lear (1607). There were other playwrights of the same time period who are rather Gothy, but I don’t particularly like them and can’t recommend ’em personally.
Faust. The character of a man who makes a deal with the devil is an old legend with several memorable writers who retold the tale as fiction or plays. Christopher Marlowe’s play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1604), Johann Wolfegang von Goethe’s Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1832), and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947) are variations of the story; my favorite was Goethe’s.
“Tom O’Bedlam,” an anonymous poem from the early 17th century, about a beggar who feigns mental illness (as in, pretending to be a former inmate of the Bethlehem Royal Hospital in London, also known as Bedlam) to gain alms. It’s dark and mad and declares the desire to stand aside from corruption and violence. It’s beautiful: I know more than Apollo,/ For oft, when he lies sleeping/ I see the stars at bloody wars/ In the wounded welkin weeping.
E.T.A. Hoffmann. The German writer best known for The Nutcracker is here for other work. The collection Tales of Hoffmann was only put together from his other works after Jacques Offenbach turned them into an opera of the same name (first performed in 1881). It’s harder to get the original collections in English, so I recommend this one; I’m dating Hoffmann on the list with the earliest of the stories, “The Sandman” (1817), about madness and clockwork.
Frankenstein. One of the early science fiction novels (let’s not argue about it), Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) reflects the fall of morality under science. It was written in the Year without a Summer (1816), where worldwide temps plummeted after a volcanic eruption the previous year, and she was stuck inside a house in Switzerland in possibly the most famous house-party of all time.
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg. There’s a current in Gothic texts of criticising religion, which is understandable. This novel was a critique of the Calvinist logic that if you’re already saved, you can’t possibly be sinning. A doppelgänger novel.
Edgar Allan Poe. “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) was a quintessential Gothic story: collapsing architecture that reflected a collapsing bloodline. Other Poe stories are great. I particularly love “The Masque of Red Death” for its suspense and craft.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841) by Charles Mackay, a nonfiction book about crowd psychology, written by a journalist. Includes observations (not accurate, given that modern research has pulled up more information) of the tulip mania craze, the Crusades, and witch mania. Not a Gothic novel at all! But foundational to Gothic sensibilities in observation of folly.
The Black Spider (1842) by Jeremias Gotthelf. I loved this book. It tells the tale not of the wealthy and powerful succumbing to corruption, but a rural village embracing corruption in order to accommodate a wealthy nobleman. Apparently Thomas Mann saw the story as a foretelling of Nazism.
Castle Eppstein (1843) by Alexandre Dumas Père. A hunter discovers an isolated castle where the Baron Eppstein and his clan once lived…of course it’s haunted. Not my favorite Dumas story—that’s The Count of Monte Cristo (1844), but it’s a solid read.
The Brontë sisters. The three sisters kind of each started their own thread of Gothics. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is a reasonably good starting point for the “governess falls in love with a troubled but wealthy man” type of Gothic. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) started a sort of bad-romance craze in Gothics. And Agnes Grey (1847) is the sane sort of Gothic romance where the heroine goes “Nope, I’m out” after wandering into the usual sort of Gothic drama, and ends up living happily ever after. It’s a palate cleanser.
Nathaniel Hawthorne. He wrote a lot of nice Gothy stuff, but his The House of the Seven Gables (1851) is his quintessentially Gothic book, centered around a house and a family rife with fraud, witchcraft, congenital diseases, and murder.
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Gothic Tales is a modern collection of her much older short fiction that includes one of my favorites, “The Old Nurse’s Story” (1852), which seems very similar to the work mentioned by Henry James in Turn of the Screw (1898). It’s relatively easy to find; her tales are all well-written.
“Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1852), by Robert Browning. The quest of a man to find the path to the Dark Tower, after searching for it for so long that he no longer has any joy in finding it, only the hope for an end. Disease, deformity, a post-apocalyptic wasteland…and is it all a dream, or isn’t it?
Les Fleurs du Mal (1857) by Charles Baudlaire, a book of decadent and erotic morbid poetry, had six of its poems censored for immorality as “an insult to public decency” during the French Second Empire period (that is, under the dictatorship of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte.
Charles Dickens. Dickens kinda bores me to death but at the same time I love his work. Great Expectations (1860) with Miss Havisham in her rotting white wedding dress might be the most Gothic of his (finished) novels, but I’d rather date this entry at the publication point of A Tale of Two Cities (1859) and its depiction of the decay of the French Revolution.
Wilkie Collins. The Woman in White (1860) is not terribly great as a mystery, but it’s an excellent read as a Gothic. A woman escaped from an asylum: is she mad, or was she driven insane by abuse?
Victor Hugo. Hugo was a bit of a rebel and was exiled from France under the dictatorship of Napoleon III for openly declaring the new emperor a traitor to France. The most Gothic of his novels is The Man Who Laughs (1869), in which a nobleman is disfigured so that he can never stop smiling grotesquely, and becomes a symbol against the hypocrisy of the ruling classes.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. He wrote a number of famous Gothic works, but I’ll anchor him to his short story collection In a Glass Darkly (1872), which includes the novella Carmilla, a lesbian vampire story and one of the earliest vampire stories in general.
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stephenson. The dual nature of the character, the use and abuse of science, the way that man’s true nature cannot be suppressed or eradicated—and how it connected the upper- and lower-class parts of London. The book (in retrospect) seems to predict the occurrence of someone like Jack the Ripper. Very Gothic.
“The Man Who Would Be King” (1888) by Rudyard Kipling. Kipling was an excellent teller of colonial Gothic tales, that is, tales of the collapsing British Empire in the area near India and Afghanistan. Instead of darkness and gloom, the forces of decay in Kipling’s ghost stories from the region often feature blinding light and oppressive heat.
Oscar Wilde was, all by himself, a very Gothic figure, almost more of a fictional character than the sum of his creative output. Here, I’m going to anchor him to the list with The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), about a man whose “bride haunting the attic” was his own authentic self, as it collapsed in response to the decadence of his false, public face.
Dracula. It’s kind of hard to talk about Bram Stoker per se on this list, when the character he invented has become almost more of a folktale than a character in the original novel, Dracula (1897). And of course Dracula the character leads to the Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) leads to the song “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” (1979) by Bauhaus leads to The Hunger (1983) and David Bowie, which is the important thing, really.
The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James, a very ambiguous novel about a governess trying to tend to two hostile children at an old mansion near some crumbling ruins.
Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad. Set in the Congo Free State under the rule of Leopold II; the plot has similarities to Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King.”
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901) by Arthur Conan Doyle. I was on the fence about this, but it does check off all the pieces of my definition. Am I succumbing to a bias that mysteries can’t also be Gothics? Maybe. But: a decaying family haunted by a glowing, supernatural hound; an asshole that needs to be spotted; the family doesn’t know what to think and thus hires Holmes to investigate; the ambiguous ending. I’ll say…yes, it belongs on my list.
The Phantom of the Opera (1910) by Gaston Leroux. The novel, of a young ingenue being taught to sing by an opera house’s resident ghost, is really good and I recommend it. It’s set at the real-life Palais Garnier, too.
“In the Penal Colony” (1919) by Franz Kafka isn’t the most Kafkaesque of his books, and it might not be the most Gothic per se (either The Trial [1914] or The Castle [1922] might be best in that regard), but it gained the most recognition with modern-day Goths as part of Joy Division’s Closer (1980) album, as “Colony.” Which, excuse me, I must now listen to.
F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby (1925) checks the Gothic boxes, even if those boxes have Art Deco borders. Have you seen pictures of the house that inspired the book, Oheka Castle? I rest my case.
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1927) by B. Traven. I didn’t really think of Westerns as Gothics until after I saw The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and a couple of its chapters, “Meal Ticket” and “The Mortal Remains.” (I had been thinking of them as noir, if anything.) But Sierra Madre checks all the boxes, and other than Heart of Darkness, I can’t think of another novel that more accurately describes corruption and moral decay—the book just happens to be set in mountains and not cathedrals or jungles, that’s all.
The Werewolf of Paris (1933) by Guy Endore was a fun early werewolf novel, that is, a sardonic exploration of a sadistic werewolf trying to find love in 1870s Paris (which was under a starvation siege by the Germans).
Isak Dineson, a.k.a. Karen Blixen. Her most Gothic book is Seven Gothic Tales (1934), which I very much liked, but probably Out of Africa (1937) counts as one, too, if you take it as the fall of the house of colonial Africa.
Daphne du Maurier. Rebecca (1938) is almost more the tale of a decrepit, abandoned mansion more than it is the story of a new wife being set against a widower’s memory of his dead former wife.
The Plague (1947), by Albert Camus. An Algerian city controlled by the colonial French (Algeria only gained its independence in 1962) is put under quarantine during a plague outbreak. A doctor tries to warn others about the outbreak but meets only denial; a criminal becomes a wealthy smuggler; a Jesuit priest blames the plague on sin; everyone is trapped together, and deluded narratives develop that cause nothing but more suffering.
The Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding. A colonial Gothic in the vein of Kipling, boys from an English public school turn to savagery when stripped of social order.
Flannery O’Connor. Her short story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) is a collection of Southern Gothic tales that she described as “nine stories about original sin, with my compliments.” All of her tales center around humankind’s self-destructive nature.
Gormenghast. Oh, good grief. When I first read the Gormenghast trilogy (1946-1956), which I picked up at a used bookstore because of the art, I was shocked that I hadn’t read it before. The most magnificent of all Gothic fantasies, to my mind. Castles, owls, cracking knees echoing through corridors, and a particularly bloody butcher’s knife. I tracked down the BBC series (2000), too; it was excellent.
A Case of Conscience (1958) by James Blish. There’s a book that should be on this list, Black Easter (1968), a Faustian sort of tale about a black magician hired to unleash the demons of hell upon the Earth, but I haven’t read it yet, so I don’t want to include it. (Yet.) A Case of Conscience definitely belongs on this list, though; a Jesuit travels to another planet as a biochemist who has learned the language of the locals and jumps to some truly nasty (and tragic) conclusions.
The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson. A novel about a bunch of psychic researchers who may have brought whatever supernatural elements they find with them. We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) is also a masterpiece, one about choosing to live with decay and corruption rather than enforcing “normality.”
Elric of Melniboné. The first of the Elric stories, “The Dreaming City” (1961), brought into view the end of a fantasy world, Melniboné, and the destructive, loathsome lengths that its last emperor must go to in order to survive. If Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings showed the destructive power of technological panaceas, Michael Moorcock’s Elric saga traces the corruption of power without any hope of salvation.
Ray Russell. I’m going to anchor him here at the date of publication of his short story “Sardonicus” (1961), about a man whose face becomes fixed in a grotesque grin after he commits an atrocity. Russell is most famous for his Satanic-panic novel The Case Against Satan (1962), but his collection Haunted Castles (1985) is, to my mind, the best starting point.
Solaris (1961) by Stanislaw Lem. Astronauts travel to a distant planet and, instead of being able to explore the planet rationally, end up being haunted by their own darkest secrets while trapped in a space station.
Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) by Ray Bradbury. I’m never sure about this one. Is it or isn’t it? The evil seems to come from outside the small-town Illinois setting…but that carnival is so very decadent and corrupt, and the characters are so very nearly tempted to give in. I finally decided to include this one, but not The Circus of Dr. Lao (1935) by Charles G. Finney, which is similar in its use of a carnival and excellent, but not as dark.
The Art of Memory (1966) by Frances A. Yates. A nonfiction book on the ancient greek art of remembering massive amounts of information without writing things down, and how that art became an occult practice, then contributed to the basis of science (via Giordano Bruno). This book was a ride. By the end, my attitude was, “I don’t agree with the Catholic Church for burning Bruno at the stake with his ‘tongue imprisoned because of his wicked words,’ but at least I understand it.”
Silence (1966) by Shūsaku Endō. A novel about a Portuguese Jesuit sent to Japan, based on historical events, as Japan tried to reject the infiltration of Christianity pushed by agents of colonial expansion. Explores the price of trying to reconcile one’s beliefs with reality, more or less from both sides of the equation.
Rosemary’s Baby (1967) by Ira Levin is set in a Gothic-revival apartment building in New York City, where a young wife becomes pregnant after dreaming of a nightmarish sexual encounter. Ira Levin was a masterful writer who could make a description of the apartment seem more disturbing than many a haunted house.
J.G. Ballard has written a lot of books that check my boxes as Gothic literature; he made a career of extrapolating decaying, corrupt future locations, often showing the overlap of technology and decadence. I’m placing him with the publication of The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), because of the Joy Division song.
Edward Gorey. It’s hard to know where to start with Gothic subculture icon Edward Gorey, but I’m going to date him for the sake of this list with Amphigorey (1972), which contains many of his shorter works, like The Gashleycrumb Tinies and The Unstrung Harp. Never have character deaths been so morbidly cute.
The Necrophiliac (1972) by Gabrielle Wittkop. This book would have been unreadably transgressive if it hadn’t been so beautifully written. The author’s first book was on E.T.A. Hoffmann.
House of Stairs (1947) by William Sleator, a young adult novel about an Escheresque facility where young people are being taught to betray each other.
The Twenty Days of Turin (1975) by Giorgio de Maria. An anonymous investigator experiences a period of collected madness in the city of Turin twenty years earlier, perhaps driven by a library of unfiltered personal confessions of evil.
Anne Rice, queen of modern Goth literature. Her Interview with a Vampire (1976) set the standard for modern-day vampires, whose tragic immortality could only be endured by the most heartless of their kind. I also particularly liked The Witching Hour (1990).
Stephen King. His novel The Shining (1977) is a lovely piece of Gothic fiction; the movie is a bit more focused on regular horror than the novel. Either way, there’s a nice twist that makes the house a literal character. I found King’s The Dark Tower series is also particularly Gothy, with American Old West elements.
V.C. Andrews. Ach, I grew up on hidden dog-eared copies of V.C. Andrews novels. Flowers in the Attic (1979) and the Dollanganger clan was a favorite.
Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979). This fairytale-inspired collection contains “In the Company of Wolves” and is particularly notable for Carter’s abandonment of the happy ending; some of the tales do end with the defeat of the villain—but not all.
Gene Wolfe is one of my literary inspirations, a very tricky science fiction writer whose works generally describe an interstellar future that reflects the corruptions of Earth’s past. I’m pinning this entry to The Shadow of the Torturer (1980), about a torturer who lives near a spaceship and dresses in black and has a blunt-ended sword.
Joyce Carol Oates. She’s been doing her thing for generations now, but I’m gonna place her in the list with Bellefleur (1980), the first novel of her Gothic quartet. When I read this book, I went, “Ah, this is the American Gormenghast.” Some of the scenes are still fresh in my mind from this book, a decade-plus after reading it.
The Name of the Rose (1980) by Umberto Eco is about as Gothic as you can get, set at an isolated monastery with mad monks and more description of 14th-century Italian architecture than you can shake a stick at. Eco was a semiotician, and the story has some rich nods toward the way people understand meaning itself: are words themselves of divine origin (at least some of them), or mortal ones?
Little, Big: or, The Fairies’ Parliament (1981) by John Crowley. How to even explain this book, I’m not sure. A quiet fantasy Gothic novel? There’s a house (and what a house), a sprawling family, discussion of the art of memory, and a lot of meta-fictional pondering about the nature of stories. One of my foundational reads, I suspect.
The Woman in Black (1983) by Susan Hill is a fun read about a solicitor going to a remote house in a marsh where he is to settle the estate of a recently dead woman, and the house is haunted by a mysterious woman in black. Not a deep story, but a good read.
Clive Barker. I’ll anchor him in this list with Books of Blood (1984) by Clive Barker, six volumes of short stories about the collapse of society in loving detail. “In the Hills, the Cities” changed how I think about stories. I enjoyed Hellraiser and some of its sequels, but I really liked the short story that inspired it, “The Hellbound Heart.”
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985) by Patrick Süskind is the tale of a serial-killer-slash-perfumier in 18th-century France. The writing is such that the setting is made of layered scents, rather than architecture as such.
Hawksmoor (1985) by Peter Ackroyd is a tale of two men: Nicholas Dyer in the early 18th century, and Nicholas Hawksmoor in modern times. Dyer is a serial killer and Satanist building churches and burying sacrifices in the foundations; Hawksmoor is investigating a series of modern crimes in the same building. The story pulls apart the idea of rational forward progress as the driving force of society.
Thomas Ligotti. Soothingly lush yet nihilistic writing, more an experience than a story. I’m going to date him with Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1986), with fond mentions of Grimscribe (1991) and Teatro Grottesco (2006).
Toni Morrison. Beloved (1987) is set partly in Cincinnati, and partly on a Southern plantation, Sweet Home. Guilt, ghosts, madness, and the effects of slavery on those who were freed from it, effects that have been passed down over the generations.
Tanith Lee. A lot of her work is genderbending, surreal, and about characters who regret surviving in a corrupt world. Her Books of Paradys series, starting with The Book of the Damned (1988) anchors her in this list.
Sandman (1989) by Neil Gaiman. I hesitated to add this because of the abuse & rape alligations set against Neil Gaiman (as well as what might be a wholesale ripoff of Tanith Lee’s Books of Paradys series, but…I’m not prepared to go through the rest of this list and research the other authors, and this was such a definitive Gothic work for me that I have to include it. Is it Goth to mourn the revelation of an author as always having been corrupt? I suppose it is.
From Hell (1989), by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, brought the Jack the Ripper tale back into public view. Alan Moore has written a number of things in the Gothic mode, with his Southern-Gothic-tinged Swamp Thing (1984) comic run and the (very graphic) Lost Girls (1991), in which Alice of Alice in Wonderland, Dorothy of Oz, and Wendy of Peter Pan meet at a luxurious hotel, where they face the collapse of European society before World War II.
Geek Love (1989), by Katherine Dunn. A traveling circus in which a couple decides to breed their own freak show (through extensive use of drugs), and the generational aftermath. The parents’ grasping of the traveling carnival as they try to hold onto their dying world, the twisted family relationships, the ambiguous ending, the narrator that both hates and craves the world that she has left behind!
Bret Easton Ellis. Ah, American Psycho (1991). The corruption of capitalist society among the Manhattan elite, the distorted reality of the narrator, the ambiguous ending. Is it Gothic or not? It feels wrong to call it a Gothic (it feels more punk to me?), but that might be because it was set in a modern world that I recognize. I’ll leave it here for now.
Poppy Z. Brite’s Gothic novels are very much Gothic-subculture-in-Southern-Gothic mode stories, starting with Lost Souls (1992). What erodes here isn’t society as such (which, in the books, is already long gone), but the institution of love itself.
Angels and Insects (1992) by A.S. Byatt. Byatt is more famous for Possession: A Romance (1990), but the two novellas here (“Morpho Eugenia” and “The Conjugial Angel”) are way more Gothy, and helped evoke the blue morpho butterfly as a Gothic symbol.
The Prestige (1995) by Christopher Priest shows the competition between two 19th-century magicians, each of which goes over and above the strictures of traditional magic to pull off their tricks. Madness, science, death. (And Tesla.)
The Sparrow (1996) by Mary Doria Russell. Hear me out, this one really is Goth even if it doesn’t get called one: colonizing Jesuits visit a planet where they very much do not understand the culture they are trying to “improve,” and drive a brutal tragedy on another planet.
Jeffrey Ford. He has a number of books that might usefully be considered Goth, but my favorites of his are in The Well-Built City trilogy, starting with The Physiognomy (1997), in which an arrogant public servant believes a doctrine that people’s moral worth is found in the shapes of their heads and the measurements of their bodies—and in the shapes and measurements of their perfect cities. Surreal and beautiful.
Lives of the Monster Dogs (1997) by Kirsten Bakis was everywhere for a while, so, like an idiot, I avoided it for a long time. When I finally read it, I was delighted. Mutant dogs, a castle in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a mad party, a sense of how brief a period of time can be, and yet change everything for you.
Doll (1998) by Mitsukazu Mihara, a grim, existential tale of androids dressed in Japanese Gothic Lolita fashions (the creator helped develop the style through her illustrations in the Gothic & Lolita Bible.
King Leopold’s Ghost (1998) by Adam Hochschild. A nonfiction book about the Belgian king Leopold II, who owned the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908, then annexed it as Belgian Congo. The locals were tortured and massacred; Victorian and Edwardian society turned a blind eye. A great book intended to counteract the “forgetfulness” that happens around atrocities while still being accessible to the non-historian reader.
Uzumaki (1998) by Junji Ito. I think I’ve run out of enthusiasm for the author (I went nuts on him for a while and possibly read so much of his work that the underlying patterns got repetitive), but Uzumaki remains excellent. Spirals—the pattern—begin to take over a small Japanese town. Very Clive Barker-esque.
Sarah Waters. Her Affinity (1999) pulls apart privilege and poverty, comparing a prisoner at a panopticon-style women’s prison with a woman trapped in Victorian domestic life. It’s very lesbian, which led to some fun plot twists.
A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999) by Daniel Handler, a.k.a. Lemony Snicket, as a series, solidified the enjoyment of Gothic literature for a new generation of readers sort of the same way the Goosebumps series by R.L. Stine solidified horror writing in general. I read them as they came out. A lot of people hated the ending but I loved it and felt that its ambiguity was truer to adult Gothics than the happy ending that children’s readers may have expected.
House of Leaves (2000) by Mark Z. Danielewski. Don’t try to read this in ebook; the layout of the physical book is part of the experience of reading the book. This is the story of a fictional house which may or may not be the book itself; the story centers on a family who buy a house in Virginia and start recording themselves, only to find the house expanding into an impenetrable labyrinth—and the way the record of the house itself drives people mad.
Death Note (2003) by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. The tale of a young man who discovers how to target certain people for death, supernaturally, with no trace. The shinigami (supernatural being concerned with inviting humans toward death) Ryuk always reminds me of the Shrike in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion/Endymion books.
Goth (2003) by Otsuichi. A collection of interwoven short stories about two high school students who are true-crime fans, tracking down local murders in an ordinary Japanese suburban neighborhood. There’s a thing where some Japanese horror is written very simply and directly, and yet (at least in translation!) it comes across as being the most claustrophobic material you can imagine.
The Devil in the White City (2003) by Erik Lason. The book draws parallels between the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition (and the way it featured electricity and science) and the serial killer H.H. Holmes, who lured victims to their deaths in his Chicago “murder castle.”
Chuck Palahniuk. I’m not going to anchor this author with his most famous work. The Fight Club (1996) novel wasn’t all that gothic, even if filmmaker David Fincher brought out what there was through his cinematography. Other Palahniuk books have been more Gothy, particularly Haunted (2005), which is an interwoven short story collection with a frame story not unlike the Villa Diodati house party of 1816 where Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampire (1819) were written. So let’s go with that.
Fledgling (2005) by Octavia Butler, is about a vampire, who aren’t human but another species, who was engineered to have darker skin so she could survive daylight—an evolutionary advantage that is still persecuted by other (very white) members of her vampire species. Octavia Butler’s writing is wonderfully dark and never swerves away from the uncomfortable.
Never Let Me Go (2005) by Kazuo Ishigo. This is one of the books I debated including, but I think it helps point a forward direction for Gothics, one where the setting is presented as being lighter and less rotten or corrupt in tone than it really is. The tale checks all my Gothic boxes, though.
Tender Morsels (2007) by Margo Lanagan. A young adult novel of a perfect personal heaven and the daughters who long to escape it. It may be “young adult,” but it is pretty graphic and dark.
Dan Simmons has written a number of horror novels that could be considered Gothic, but my favorites have been The Terror (2007) and Drood (2009), which drew strongly on Edgar Allan Poe and Wilkie Collins influences, respectively.
The Vegetarian (2007) by Han Kang, set in Seoul, South Korea, about a woman who decides to stop eating meat after a series of disturbing dreams in which she slaughters and witnesses the slaughter of animals. A lovely novel about the decay of urban mores and morality.
White Is for Witching (2009) by Helen Oyeyemi, is the tale of a house that is both sort-of-intelligent and xenophobic, much like LLM AIs today.
Through the Woods (2014) by E.M. Carroll. The author has several Gothy titles, but this is my favorite, with five short tales full of blood and madness.
The Worst of Us (2015) by Jason Dias. A split-timeline novel, set half during the Vietnam War and half in a modern mental health institution, in which the war is a mere distraction from larger monsters. The author has Gothier books, like Sanguine Vengeance (2018), but this is my favorite, with the contrast between overgrown jungle and the cruel yet liminal emptiness of institutional spaces.
The Devourers (2015) by Indra Das. Set in Kolkata, India. The story spans from 17th-century Mughal India to modern times, with interwoven narratives of shapeshifters. I’m a sucker for the Arabian Nights-like structures. Something I’ve noted in more modern Gothic books is a rejection of the innocence/helplessness of the “good” characters that often pervades earlier Gothic narratives. This book delves deeply into that aspect.
The Broken Earth Trilogy (2015) by N.K. Jemisin. Decay and corruption, check. Built into the world of the story. Check. And built into the characters. Check. Uncertainty due to distorted narratives. Oh yeah, check. Facing harsh truths in order to survive? May not be enough by a long shot. Check.
Mongrels (2016) by Stephen Graham Jones. Is this one punk or is it Gothic? Hm…I’m on the fence here. The tale of a family of Native American werewolves and the decay of the American South. Most of Jones’s other books lean punk. But something about the main character, who has werewolf blood but may never turn into one, speaks to the Goth in me.
Things We Lost in the Fire (2016) by Mariana Enriquez. A collection of short Gothic stories set in Argentina, set in abandoned parts of Buenos Aires. Haunted houses, homeless children, maddened wives.
The Pursuit of William Abbey (2019) by Claire North. This book is a continuation of the Rudyard Kipling colonial Gothic mode, I think, and feels influenced by King Leopold’s Ghost.
Susannah Clarke. Oof, I had to do some thinking about this one. On the one hand, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004) is such a good fantasy-based Gothic to get lost in; on the other hand, the House in Piranesi (2020) is so very, very excellent. I’ll anchor the author to the list with Piranesi, though, because it led me to look up Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the 18th-century architect who was M.C. Escher before M.C. Escher was cool, creating etchings for fictitious prisons, the Carceri d’invenzione.
Gothic Fiction: First and Last and Always…
Gothic fiction more or less officially began with Horace Walpole’s rather silly book, The Castle of Otranto, but what the Gothic quickly tapped into was more serious and worthy of note: a way of processing knowledge about corruption, decay, and death that didn’t depend on sermonizing or stories about heroes who managed to save the day in the face of insurmountable odds.
Instead, Gothic fiction is the much more relatable tale of people who are given a choice between facing uncomfortable truths and self-destruction.
Gothic fiction isn’t just about vampires or haunted castles or innocent, naïve women figuring out that the person they love is evil—but those things are welcome.
The essence of Gothic fiction, at least from a modern lens, is coping with endings—coping with realizing that our assumptions have been wrong—coping with death.
Yes, it gets silly at times; at times it doesn’t dig very deep.
But sometimes we don’t need entertainment that tells us that we can only be the heroes of our own stories if we save everyone around us, but entertainment that tells us that there is a quiet heroism in recognizing our own mistakes and biases, and surviving despite corruption and decay.
Maybe now it’s time for that.
So if you’re seeing this message, it’s because I’m running a Kickstarter for my new novel, House of Masks. Please take a moment to check it out!
The Vegetarian is probably the most disturbing books I’ve read in the last decade. Truly gut-wrenching.
Yes. I loved it tho.
This list is amazing! I love how it dives into the dark, atmospheric qualities of Gothic literature with such enthusiasm, making me want to re-read all these classics and discover new favorites. The personal touch really makes it shine!