5 Modern Authors Upholding the Gothic Feminist Tradition in 2020

In this heavily buzzed summer release, a young socialite discovers the haunting secrets of a beautiful old mansion in 1950s Mexico. When Neomi’s newlywed cousin writes to her begging for help, claiming her husband is trying to poison her and she keeps having menacing visions, Neomi departs from her posh life in Mexico City and to the remote estate. The house is strange from the first—it’s overrun with mold and the servants won’t speak. Neomi can see right away her cousin is losing her mind. But then Neomi starts to hear the voices, too.

As if the fresh take on beloved gothic conventions wasn’t enough, this story’s heroine is at once chic, unconventional, smart, tough—and wholly memorable.

The premise of this one requires a leap of faith, so strange itself that the reader is already a little off kilter at the start: Catherine House is a highly selective (and secretive) college alternative educational program. You give yourself to Catherine House for three years—no TV, no internet, no music, no leaving. But then, its graduates go on to be Supreme Court justices, renowned authors, presidents, and all sorts of leading minds of the world.

Just don’t look too closely at the new materials department.

Ines doesn’t care about any of this, only that she gets to escape from her terrible past. At first, she’s only interested in distracting herself from the secret she has buried with parties, drinking, and sex, but slowly the school’s magnetic secrets draw her in. Like a car crash, you know something terrible is about to happen, but still you can’t look away.

Judith escapes her mother to Georgia countryside, where a kindly innkeeper gives her a cabin to live in. Here, Judith begins her titular Sunday ritual of picking flowers, which  leads her into the woods, introduces her to strange characters within, and in particular, to Nemoira.

In a complicated narrative about the damage we can do to one another—especially within a family—and the closure and healing of moving past it, this atmospheric story offers a captivating dive into transformation, healing and reckoning.

Decades ago, Carly’s aunt Viv disappeared while working at the Sun Down Motel. Carly can’t let go of the strange story, so she moves to the town and starts investigating. Oddly, the motel doesn’t seem to have changed since 1982, the year Vivian disappeared. Through a dual narrative that stretches through time, the reader unravels the mystery of an old motel full of terrible secrets and a string of related murders.

In this period story, Louise Pinecroft is sent away for the most Victorian of reasons—consumption has killed most of her family, leaving only herself and her father. For his part, Dr. Pinecroft believes that the cure for the disease is the sea air, and to prove it he invites a set of prisoners with consumption to the caves of their Cornish seaside home, and Louise become enchanted with the tales of fairies her maid tells her.

Decades later, Hester comes to care for a mute and partially paralyzed older Louise as an escape from her past—but the history of the place she has landed at may prove even more dangerous.