100 Best Gothic Books and Stories (of All Time)


gothic books novels stories novellas literature

Gothic novels are notable for their overwrought drama, dark corridors, mysterious locales and eerie atmospheres. The list below encompasses a variety of Gothic books, short stories and novellas, both modern and classic, and includes Southern Gothic novels as well.

This list is divided into the following categories:

General Gothic Novels
Gothic Short Stories and Novellas
Southern Gothic Novels


For a quick primer on the Gothic genre and Southern Gothic sub-genre:

What are Gothic Novels?

Gothic novels typically dabble with darker elements, like horror, death or the macabre. It’s a genre typified by heightened emotions, often with an air of sexuality or romance as well. There’s also generally a reliance on supernatural or unusual events to guide the plot.

What is Southern Gothic literature?

Southern Gothic literature is a sub-genre of the Gothic novel. Southern Gothic literature typically to replaces the euro-centric elements of traditionally Gothic writing like castles and maidens and replaces them with American Southern elements like farmhouses, churches, small town lawyers or the local drunkard.

They are typically gritty or grotesque. Additionally, the issues that Southern Gothic novels explore typically grapple with a different set of social issues than “traditional” Gothic novels and have cultural characteristics that are reflexive of the American South.

However, in terms of the tone, the supernatural elements and a focus on darker aspects of life, it’s clear why these novels fall under the classification of “Gothic novels.”


General Gothic Novels

Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte

What It's About:

Publication Date: November 30, 2010
  


Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte

What It's About:

Publication Date: August 25, 2009
  


Rebecca
Daphne Du Maurier

What It's About:

Publication Date: November 1, 1997
  


My Cousin Rachel
Daphne du Maurier

What It's About:

Publication Date: April 18, 2017
  


The Thirteenth Tale
Diane Setterfield

What It's About:

Publication Date: September 12, 2006
  


We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Shirley Jackson

What It's About:

Publication Date: October 31, 2006
  


The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafon

What It's About:

Publication Date: February 18, 2024
  


The Phantom of the Opera
Gaston Leroux

What It's About:

Publication Date: January 7, 2020
  


The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde

What It's About:

Publication Date: February 4, 2003
  


The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas

What It's About:

Publication Date: June 11, 2002
  


Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen

What It's About:

Publication Date: November 1, 2014
  

The Bloody Chamber
Angela Carter

What It's About:

Publication Date: January 1, 1990
  


The Magic Toyshop
Angela Carter

What It's About:

Publication Date: August 1, 1996
  


Her Fearful Symmetry
Audrey Niffenegger

What It's About:

Publication Date: September 29, 2009
  


White is for Witching
Helen Oyeyemi

What It's About:

Publication Date: February 18, 2024
  


Bitter Orange
Claire Fuller

What It's About:

Publication Date: October 9, 2018
  


The Broken Girls
Simone St. James

What It's About:

Publication Date: March 20, 2018
  


Mexican Gothic
Silvia Moreno-Garcia

What It's About:

Publication Date: June 30, 2020
  


Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Patrick Süskind

What It's About:

Publication Date: February 18, 2024
  


Slade House
David Mitchell

What It's About:

Publication Date: June 28, 2016
  


Black Rabbit Hall
Eve Chase

What It's About:

Publication Date: February 18, 2024
  


The Secret History
Donna Tartt

What It's About:

Publication Date: September 11, 1992
  


The House at Riverton
Kate Morton

What It's About:

Publication Date: March 3, 2009
  


The Distant Hours
Kate Morton

What It's About:

Publication Date: November 9, 2010
  


The Silent Companions
Laura Purcell

What It's About:

Publication Date: October 5, 2017
  


The Corset / The Poison Thread
Laura Purcell

What It's About:

Publication Date: June 18, 2019
  


The Hoarder / Mr. Flood's Last Resort
Jess Kidd

What It's About:

Publication Date: February 1, 2018
  


The Stranger Diaries

What It's About:

Publication Date: Not Available
  


The House Between Tides
Sarah Maine

What It's About:

Publication Date: August 2, 2016
  


The Essex Serpent
Sarah Perry

What It's About:

Publication Date: June 6, 2017
  


House of Salt and Sorrows
Erin A. Craig

What It's About:

Publication Date: August 6, 2019
  


The Fate of Mercy Alban
Wendy Webb

What It's About:

Publication Date: February 5, 2013
  


Wakenhyrst
Michelle Paver

What It's About:

Publication Date: April 4, 2019
  


Bone China

What It's About:

Publication Date: Not Available
  


The Familiars

What It's About:

Publication Date: Not Available
  


The Historian
Elizabeth Kostova

What It's About:

Publication Date: June 14, 2005
  


The Gargoyle
Andrew Davidson

What It's About:

Publication Date: August 5, 2008
  


The Paying Guests
Sarah Waters

What It's About:

Publication Date: August 28, 2014
  


The Little Stranger
Sarah Waters

What It's About:

Publication Date: April 30, 2009
  


Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys

What It's About:

Publication Date: January 25, 2016
  


The Shining
stephen king

What It's About:

Publication Date: February 17, 1978
  


Something Wicked This Way Comes
Ray Bradbury

What It's About:

Publication Date: October 24, 2017
  


Rosemary's Baby
Ira Levin

What It's About:

Publication Date: March 7, 2017
  


The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle

What It's About:

Publication Date: October 1, 2001
  


The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Anne Bronte

What It's About:

Publication Date: June 1, 1996
  


The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins

What It's About:

Publication Date: April 29, 2003
  


Frankenstein
Mary Shelley

What It's About:

Publication Date: Not Available
  


Dracula
Bram Stoker

What It's About:

Publication Date: April 29, 2003
  


Lady Audley's Secret
Mary Elizabeth Braddon

What It's About:

Publication Date: May 29, 2012
  


The Mysteries of Udolpho
Ann Radcliffe

What It's About:

Publication Date: November 15, 2008
  


The Monk
Matthew Lewis

What It's About:

Publication Date: August 28, 2012
  


The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco

What It's About:

Publication Date: April 22, 2014
  


The Turn of the Screw
Henry James

What It's About:

Publication Date: September 27, 2011
  


The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson

What It's About:

Publication Date: February 18, 2024
  


Flowers in the Attic
V.C. Andrews

What It's About:

Publication Date: November 12, 2019
  


The Graveyard Book
Neil Gaiman

What It's About: Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a normal boy. He would be completely normal if he didn't live in a graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts.

There are dangers and adventures for Bod in the graveyard. But it is in the land of the living that real danger lurks for it is there that the man Jack lives and he has already killed Bod's family.

Publication Date: September 30, 2008
  
young adult horror middle grade

Novellas and Short Stories

The Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allan Poe

What It's About: And much of Madness and more of Sin
And Horror the Soul of the Plot

The lines from 'Ligeia' epitomize the familiar Poe, the arch-priest of Gothic horror, author of 'The Masque of the Red Death' and 'The Pit and the Pendulum'. That Poe, unquestioned master of 'the Grotesque and Arabesque', is fully represented here, but the volume also includes generous selections from his poetry and critical writings...

Publication Date: October 7, 1986
  
classics horror short stories


The Tell-Tale Heart: And Other Stories
Edgar Allan Poe

What It's About: A masquerade ball in a secluded abbey; a vendetta settled in the wine cellars of an Italian palazzo; a gloomy castle in a desolated landscape; the beating of a heart beneath the floorboards: the plots and settings of Poe’s dark, mysterious tales continue to haunt the popular imagination. This new selection introduces the greatest Gothic fiction from one of the most deranged and deliciously weird writers of the 19th century...

Publication Date: January 1, 2017
  
classics horror short stories


The Yellow Wall-Paper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman

What It's About: Diagnosed by her physician husband with a “temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency” after the birth of her child, a woman is urged to rest for the summer in an old colonial mansion. Forbidden from doing work of any kind, she spends her days in the house’s former nursery, with its barred windows, scratched floor, and peeling yellow wallpaper...

Publication Date: September 1, 1996
  
short stories horror feminism


The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Washington Irving

What It's About: In the secluded Dutch territory of Sleepy Hollow, nebbish schoolmaster Ichabod Crane competes with the town hero for the hand of Katrina Van Tassel, the 18-year-old daughter and sole child of a wealthy farmer. As Crane leaves a party at the Van Tassel's farm one autumn evening, he is pursued by the Headless Horseman, an apparition said to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper snuffed out by a stray cannonball during the Revolutionary War.

Publication Date: October 1, 2017
  
classics horror short stories


Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales
Robert Louis Stevenson

What It's About: 'All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil'

Published as a shilling shocker, Robert Louis Stevenson's dark psychological fantasy gave birth to the idea of the split personality. The story of respectable Dr Jekyll's strange association with damnable young man Edward Hyde; the hunt through fog-bound London for a killer; and the final revelation of Hyde's true identity is a chilling exploration of humanity's basest capacity for evil.

Publication Date: December 25, 2012
  
horror classic gothic


Wylding Hall
Elizabeth Hand

What It's About: When the young members of a British acid-folk band are compelled by their manager to record their unique music, they hole up at Wylding Hall, an ancient country house with dark secrets. There they create the album that will make their reputation, but at a terrifying cost: Julian Blake, the group’s lead singer, disappears within the mansion and is never seen or heard from again...

Publication Date: March 20, 2015
  
gothic fantasy mystery


Gothic Tales
Elizabeth Gaskell

What It's About: 'Such whispered tales, such old temptations and hauntings, and devilish terrors'

Elizabeth Gaskell's chilling Gothic tales blend the real and the supernatural to eerie, compelling effect. 'Disappearances', inspired by local legends of mysterious vanishings, mixes gossip and fact; 'Lois the Witch', a novella based on an account of the Salem witch hunts, shows how sexual desire and jealousy lead to hysteria; while in 'The Old Nurse's Story' a mysterious child roams the freezing Northumberland moors...

Publication Date: February 1, 2001
  
gothic horror short stories


The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
Edith Wharton

What It's About: These 11 spine-tingling tales of the supernatural bring to light the author's interest in the traditional New England ghost story and her fascination with spirits, hauntings, and other phenomena. Fine line-drawings by Laszlo Kubinyi enhance the mysterious and sometimes chilling mood.

The lady's maid's bell (1904)
The eyes (1910)
Afterward (1910)
Kerfol (1916)
The triumph of night (1914)
Miss Mary Pask (1925)
Bewitched (1925)
Mr Jones (1928)
Pomegranate seed (1931)
The looking glass (1935)
All souls' (1937)

Publication Date: October 20, 2020
  
short stories horror classics


American Gothic Tales
Joyce Carol Oates

What It's About:

Publication Date: December 1, 1996
  


Things We Lost in the Fire
Mariana Enriquez

What It's About: In these wildly imaginative, devilishly daring tales of the macabre, internationally bestselling author Mariana Enriquez brings contemporary Argentina to vibrant life as a place where shocking inequality, violence, and corruption are the law of the land, while military dictatorship and legions of desaparecidos loom large in the collective memory...

Publication Date: February 10, 2016
  
short stories horror argentina


Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales
Yoko Ogawa

What It's About: SINISTER FORCES COLLIDE AND UNITE A HOST OF DESPERATE CHARACTERS IN THIS EERIE CYCLE OF INTERWOVEN TALES FROM YOKO OGAWA, THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED AUTHOR OF THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR.

An aspiring writer moves into a new apartment and discovers that her landlady has murdered her husband...

Publication Date: June 1, 1998
  
short stories horror japan


The Diving Pool: Three Novellas
Yoko Ogawa

What It's About:

Publication Date: January 22, 2008
  


The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories
Carson McCullers

What It's About:

Publication Date: April 5, 2005
  


Wilderness Tips
Margaret Atwood

What It's About: In each of these tales Margaret Atwood deftly illuminates the single instant that shapes a whole life: in a few brief pages we watch as characters progress from the vulnerabilities of adolescence through the passions of youth into the precarious complexities of middle age.  By superimposing the past on the present, Atwood paints interior landscapes shaped by time, regret, and life's lost chances, endowing even the banal with a sense of mystery...

Publication Date: January 1, 2010
  
canadian books i own canada


Runaway
Alice Munro

What It's About: The incomparable Alice Munro’s bestselling and rapturously acclaimed Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster of her intimate relationships...

Publication Date: November 8, 2005
  
short stories canadian canada


Through the Woods
Emily Carroll

What It's About:

Publication Date: July 15, 2014
  


The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories
Tim Burton

What It's About: From breathtaking stop-action animation to bittersweet modern fairy tales, filmmaker Tim Burton has become known for his unique visual brilliance – witty and macabre at once. Now he gives birth to a cast of gruesomely sympathetic children – misunderstood outcasts who struggle to find love and belonging in their cruel, cruel worlds...

Publication Date: October 22, 1997
  
short stories fantasy books i own


Coraline
Neil Gaiman

What It's About: The day after they moved in, Coraline went exploring....

In Coraline's family's new flat are twenty-one windows and fourteen doors. Thirteen of the doors open and close.

The fourteenth is locked, and on the other side is only a brick wall, until the day Coraline unlocks the door to find a passage to another flat in another house just like her own...

Publication Date: July 2, 2002
  
horror young adult middle grade


Southern Gothic Novels

Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward

What It's About: A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award–winner Jesmyn Ward.

In Jesmyn Ward’s first novel since her National Book Award–winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi’s past and present that is both an intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle...

Publication Date: September 5, 2017
  
book club magical realism contemporary


Beloved
Toni Morrison

What It's About:

Publication Date: June 8, 2004
  


The Color Purple
Alice Walker

What It's About: Read the original inspiration for the new, boldly reimagined film from producers Oprah Winfrey and Steven Spielberg, starring Taraji P. Henson, Danielle Brooks, and Fantasia Barrino.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award

A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia...

Publication Date: June 1, 1982
  
classics historical fiction feminism


To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee

What It's About: An alternative cover edition (50th Anniversary Edition) for this ISBN can be found here.

'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'

A lawyer's advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of Harper Lee's classic novel - a black man charged with the rape of a white girl...

Publication Date: July 11, 1960
  
classics classic historical fiction


Wise Blood
Flannery O'Connor

What It's About: (This is an alternate-cover edition for ISBN 9780374530631)

The American short story master Flannery O'Connor's haunting first novel of faith, false prophets, and redemptive wisdom.

Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature...

Publication Date: May 15, 1952
  
classics southern gothic novels


The Violent Bear It Away
Flannery O'Connor

What It's About: First published in 1960, The Violent Bear It Away is now a landmark in American literature. It is a dark and absorbing example of the Gothic sensibility and bracing satirical voice that are united in Flannery O'Conner's work. In it, the orphaned Francis Marion Tarwater and his cousins, the schoolteacher Rayber, defy the prophecy of their dead uncle--that Tarwater will become a prophet and will baptize Rayber's young son, Bishop...

Publication Date: January 1, 1960
  
classics southern gothic gothic


In Cold Blood
Truman Capote

What It's About:

Publication Date: February 1, 1994
  


The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers

What It's About: With the publication of her first novel, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary sensation. With its profound sense of moral isolation and its compassionate glimpses into its characters' inner lives, the novel is considered McCullers' finest work, an enduring masterpiece first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1940...

Publication Date: June 4, 1940
  
classics book club classic


Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston

What It's About: Fair and long-legged, independent and articulate, Janie Crawford sets out to be her own person—no mean feat for a black woman in the '30s. Janie's quest for identity takes her through three marriages and into a journey back to her roots.

Publication Date: May 30, 2006
  
classics historical fiction school


Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
John Berendt

What It's About: A sublime and seductive reading experience. Brilliantly conceived and masterfully written, this enormously engaging portrait of a most beguiling Southern city has become a modern classic.

Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the misty, early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares...

Publication Date: January 13, 1994
  
non fiction true crime mystery


The Devil All the Time
Donald Ray Pollock

What It's About: From the acclaimed author of Knockemstiff (“A powerful, remarkable, exceptional book.” –Los Angeles Times): a dark and riveting vision of America that delivers literary excitement in the highest degree.

Set in rural southern Ohio and West Virginia, The Devil All the Time follows a cast of compelling and bizarre characters from the end of World War II to the 1960s...

Publication Date: July 12, 2011
  
horror thriller historical fiction


Knockemstiff
Donald Ray Pollock

What It's About: In this unforgettable work of fiction, Donald Ray Pollock peers into the soul of a tough Midwestern American town to reveal the sad, stunted but resilient lives of its residents.

Spanning a period from the mid-sixties to the late nineties, the linked stories that comprise Knockemstiff feature a cast of recurring characters who are woebegone, baffled and depraved but irresistibly, undeniably real...

Publication Date: March 18, 2008
  
short stories southern gothic horror


Winter's Bone
Daniel Woodrell

What It's About: The sheriff's deputy at the front door brings hard news to Ree Dolly. Her father has skipped bail on charges that he ran a crystal meth lab, and the Dollys will lose their house if he doesn't show up for his next court date.

Ree's father has disappeared before. The Dolly clan has worked the shadowy side of the law for generations, and arrests (and attempts to avoid them) are part of life in Rathlin Valley...

Publication Date: August 7, 2006
  
mystery crime contemporary


The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner

What It's About: “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire. . . . I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools...

Publication Date: October 1, 1990
  
classics literature classic


Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner

What It's About: Published in 1936, Absalom, Absalom! is considered by many to be William Faulkner's masterpiece. Although the novel's complex and fragmented structure poses considerable difficulty to readers, the book's literary merits place it squarely in the ranks of America's finest novels. The story concerns Thomas Sutpen, a poor man who finds wealth and then marries into a respectable family...

Publication Date: November 1, 1990
  
classics literature classic


Swamplandia!
Karen Russell

What It's About: The Bigtree alligator wrestling dynasty is in decline—think Buddenbrooks set in the Florida Everglades—and Swamplandia!, their island home and gator-wrestling theme park, is swiftly being encroached upon by a sophisticated competitor known as the "World of Darkness."

Ava, a resourceful but terrified twelve-year-old, must manage seventy gators and the vast, inscrutable landscape of her own grief...

Publication Date: February 4, 2011
  
book club magical realism fantasy


The Road
Cormac McCarthy

What It's About: The searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son’s fight to survive.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there...

Publication Date: March 28, 2006
  
science fiction dystopian dystopia


Child of God
Cormac McCarthy

What It's About: Falsely accused of rape, Lester Ballard – a violent, dispossessed man who haunts the hill country of East Tennessee – is released from jail and allowed to roam at will, preying on the population with his strange lusts. His everyday actions are transformed into stunning scenes of the comic and the grotesque...

Publication Date: June 29, 1993
  
horror southern gothic cormac mccarthy


Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Tennessee Williams

What It's About: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof first heated up Broadway in 1955 with its gothic American story of brothers vying for their dying father’s inheritance amid a whirlwind of sexuality, untethered in the person of Maggie the Cat. The play also daringly showcased the burden of sexuality repressed in the agony of her husband, Brick Pollitt...

Publication Date: September 17, 2004
  
classics drama play


The Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams

What It's About: No play in the modern theater has so captured the imagination and heart of the American public as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie. As Williams's first popular success, it launched the brilliant, if somewhat controversial, career, of our pre-eminent lyric playwright. Since its premiere in Chicago in 1944, with the legendary Laurette Taylor in the role of Amanda, Menagaerie has been the bravura piece for great actresses from Jessica Tandy to Joanne Woodward, and is studied and performed in classrooms and theatres around the world...

Publication Date: June 17, 1999
  
classics drama play


Beautiful Creatures
Kami Garcia

What It's About:

Publication Date: December 1, 2009
  


gothic books novels stories novellas literature

gothic books novels stories novellas literature

gothic books novels stories novellas literature

Share this post

  

Bookshelf -- A literary set collection game