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🍂 Books to Read When It Gets Dark at 5 PM
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items There is something about autumn that makes me want to read differently. As soon as the days get shorter and it starts getting dark ridiculously early, I suddenly want books with old houses, strange families, foggy landscapes, complicated women, unrel...
Sections
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🕯️ Old Houses, Foggy Nights & People Making Terrible Decisions
🎃 Monsters, Magic & Things That Should Not Exist
🕸️ When the Horror Is Actually Inside Your Head
🕯️ Old Houses, Foggy Nights & People Making Terrible Decisions
This is the classic gothic section, but I mixed the obvious historical works with newer novels that capture the same atmosphere. These are the books I associate with rainy afternoons, old houses, fireplaces, mysterious letters, and characters who def...
This feels like a modern answer to the classic haunted-house novel. A doctor becomes involved with a once-wealthy family living in a huge country house that is slowly falling apart. Strange things begin happening, but the book never makes it complete...
The Little Stranger
This is such a small book compared with some of the enormous gothic novels, but somehow it manages to create an incredible amount of paranoia. A governess arrives at an isolated estate to look after two children and starts seeing mysterious figures. ...
The Turn of the Screw
I love this one because it doesn't depend on traditional horror tricks. The house is terrifying, but the psychological side of the story is just as important. Eleanor arrives at Hill House already lonely and emotionally vulnerable, and the longer she...
The Haunting of Hill House
This was one of my favorite modern additions to the gothic tradition because it takes all those familiar elements — the mysterious mansion, the strange family, the isolated setting, the sick relative — and puts them somewhere completely different. No...
Mexican Gothic
I feel like Jane Eyre is almost impossible to leave off a fall reading list. It has everything: an isolated house, strange noises, secrets, dramatic weather, romance, and a protagonist who is constantly trying to figure out what is actually happening...
Jane Eyre
🎃 Monsters, Magic & Things That Should Not Exist
This section is for the books where reality starts becoming unreliable. Some are old, some are new, and some aren't technically horror at all. I wanted a mixture of vampires, strange creatures, surreal worlds, supernatural forces, and books that make...
Okay, this one is technically an obvious choice, but I couldn't make a Halloween list without it. What surprised me when I actually read it was how much more interesting it is than the Dracula image we have absorbed from movies and Halloween decorati...
Dracula
This is one of the newer books I'd put on the list because it creates the feeling of a gothic mystery without actually being a traditional gothic novel. Piranesi lives in an enormous house filled with statues, endless rooms, staircases, and tides tha...
Piranesi (Women's Prize for Fiction Winner)
The interesting thing about Frankenstein is that the monster isn't necessarily the scariest part. The more I read it, the more I thought about loneliness and responsibility. Victor creates something incredible and then immediately abandons it because...
Frankenstein (Penguin Classics)
This is where the list gets weird. It's set on a spaceship where human and humanoid workers are questioned about strange events happening on board. Instead of a normal narrative, you get a collection of statements from the employees, and gradually yo...
The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd century
I absolutely love the idea of taking fairy tales that everyone thinks they know and making them much darker. Carter's stories are full of castles, wolves, forbidden rooms, strange marriages, blood, and women who refuse to behave like traditional fair...
The Bloody Chamber
🕸️ When the Horror Is Actually Inside Your Head
For the last section, I wanted to move away from obvious monsters and focus on books where the unsettling part comes from people, memory, grief, loneliness, obsession, or the feeling that you can't completely trust what you're experiencing. These are...
This book has one of the best gothic concepts ever: Dorian remains young and beautiful while his portrait changes to reflect everything he does. But what I found more interesting than the supernatural element was the question of what happens when som...
The Picture of Dorian Gray
This is one of those books where the premise sounds almost absurdly simple: a woman decides to stop eating meat. But her decision gradually becomes much more radical and begins affecting her entire family. What I found disturbing was the way everyone...
The Vegetarian
This is another book where I wasn't entirely sure who I was supposed to be afraid of. Merricat and Constance live together in a secluded house after most of their family dies, and the surrounding community treats them with suspicion and hostility. Me...
We Have Always Lived in the Castle: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)
This is probably the most emotional book on the list. Leah goes on a deep-sea expedition and returns home after something has gone wrong, but she doesn't seem entirely like the person who left. Miri tries to understand what happened while also confro...
Our Wives Under the Sea: A Novel