Horror is having a moment. Once confined largely to Halloween, or at least to October, “spooky season” has evolved into a monthslong phenomenon — and our hunger for the frightful doesn’t stop there.
At a time when real life can feel like a nightmare, a collective turn toward the ghoulish and the ghastly might seem counterintuitive, but the Gothic genre has always offered a space to examine the darkest corners of the human psyche. The supernatural happenings that scare us out of our skin are — like the portrait of Dorian Gray — reflections of our own evil as much as anything else. These novels, both old and new, will make you shiver with delight one moment and recoil in hair-raising horror the next.
Rebecca
By Daphne du Maurier
In this master class of psychological horror, the naïve second wife of Maxim de Winter grapples with the legacy of his first spouse, Rebecca. Du Maurier makes good use of many of the usual tropes of the Gothic genre, especially uncanny doubling: Relentlessly and unfavorably compared to the Manderley estate’s bewitching former mistress, the nameless narrator is pushed to the brink of sanity by the sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. Secrets bob to the surface like drowning victims from the deep until nobody — not even the reader — can easily separate the terrible truth from even more terrible fictions.
The Keep
By Jennifer Egan
This book has it all: castles, caves, childhood nightmares dragged back into the light. Grotesque and fantastic, “The Keep” is one of Egan’s more experimental novels, in which two cousins haunted by a childhood prank reunite in a remote village in Eastern Europe to turn its tumbledown castle into an alternative resort. (“The White Lotus” Season 4, anyone?) Egan’s descriptions of the setting are elegant, whimsical and incredibly evocative, conjuring a rare and delightful tale of things that go bump in the night.
A Heart So White
By Javier Marías; translated by Margaret Jull Costa
In the late 1700s, many of the earliest Gothic writers turned to Shakespeare for inspiration. Two centuries later, the Spanish writer Marías took a page out of their book with “Corazón tan blanco,” published in English as “A Heart So White,” which borrows not only its title but also many of its major themes from “Macbeth.” After their wedding, Juan, the narrator, and his young wife begin probing his father’s shadowed past, and find blood and betrayal at every turn. As in “Rebecca,” in this tale a new marriage exposes old family secrets and cycles of violence, but through a glass darkly. Author and narrator alike refuse easy moral judgments as past and present collapse in murky obscurity. Set in Spain and Cuba, “A Heart So White” also shares with Shakespeare’s Scottish play a lingering unease at the bloody legacies of Catholic dogma. But the real witchcraft in the novel is the language; even in translation, Marías’s sinuous, elliptical prose unfolds like a troubled dream.
Earthlings
By Sayaka Murata; translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
One of the strangest novels you will ever read, Murata’s “Earthlings” is impossible to categorize and just as difficult to describe. That’s exactly what makes the book so delicious — and so disturbing. Murata’s hairpin narrative style keeps readers so persistently off-balance that you’ll feel like a Gothic heroine yourself, lost in a maze of blind corners, dead ends and mind-boggling moments. But the darkness lurking at the core of this modern fable about a girl who believes she is an alien is all too real and so eerily familiar that, when the shocking ending arrives, you might not know what to believe.
Fledgling
By Octavia E. Butler
Like many of the best-known Gothic thrillers of centuries past, “Fledgling” blends genres and bends morality with grisly determination. One part horror, one part science fiction and one part fantasy, this is a refreshingly freaky entry in the overworn category of vampire fiction. As sinister as they are seductive, Butler’s bloodsuckers prey on human frailty as much as human flesh. The novel’s protagonist, Shori, challenges — often violently — assumptions about race and power, sexuality and desire, and every ethical truth you thought you knew. Not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach, “Fledgling” is a slim but sharp-toothed novel unjustly overlooked in Butler’s oeuvre.
Sundial
By Catriona Ward
Ward’s sun-soaked “Sundial” is Southwestern Gothic at its finest. Childhood horrors and bones long buried splinter into the present when Rob spirits her elder daughter away from their suburban neighborhood after the remains of house pets and local wildlife start turning up in her bedroom and the 12-year-old’s “silent fury” threatens her younger sister. Rob’s strange and sinister childhood home offers no sanctuary, however: It harbors a dark history of child abuse, dubious animal experimentation and an unnamed evil slinking through the badlands like a snake.
The Cement Garden
By Ian McEwan
The premise alone is goose bumps grim: After the death of their mother, four children decide to hide her body in a trunk of cement in their basement and fend for themselves rather than surrender to social workers and foster care. What follows is a twisted game of house where familiar familial relationships crumble and new ones take root like nasty black weeds. This one will make your skin crawl.
The Historian
By Elizabeth Kostova
In her fresh take on the vampire novel, Kostova reworks the Dracula legend with a historian’s meticulous attention to detail. Following in the tradition of imperiled Gothic heroines, a young woman in 1970s Amsterdam finds herself in the clutches of malevolent forces as she tries to unravel the mystery of her mother’s disappearance, which seems to be tied to the 15th-century reign of Vlad the Impaler and a sinister, supernatural legacy that stretches into her present. The sweeping scope of this aptly titled novel makes it perfect for a long dark evening, and for readers who like a side of folklore with their thrills and chills.
Child of God
By Cormac McCarthy
A word of caution: Don’t read this book on the bus, or the train, or anywhere else someone might be tempted to look over your shoulder. McCarthy follows in the footsteps of William Faulkner in this disquieting masterpiece of Southern Gothic horror, treading where few other authors dare. His characteristically sparse prose only makes this portrait of a necrophiliac serial killer haunting the hill country of eastern Tennessee that much more disturbing: Lester Ballard makes Norman Bates look like Beaver Cleaver.
Our Share of Night
By Mariana Enríquez; translated by Megan McDowell
If such a thing as a slow-burn thriller exists, this is it. Like “The Historian,” Enríquez’s dense danse macabre of a novel braids together fantasy, horror and historical fiction. Set in the 1980s and ’90s, against the aftermath of Argentina’s military dictatorship, “Our Share of Night” reimagines the all-too-human evils of the world as a ravenous supernatural power known only as “the Darkness,” which has spawned a secret society of rich, immortality-seeking devotees known as the Cult of the Shadow. The Darkness feeds on suffering and cruelty and, as this circuitous tale spins through the years and around the world, it finds more than enough acolytes to satisfy its gruesome appetite.
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