9 Gothic Books to Read this Autumn

This beautifully written gothic classic was a happy surprise, a book I discovered half by accident when I picked it up in a bookstore in Barcelona. I read it on the twisting stone pathways of the city, and it was perfect. Nada tells the story of Andrea, a young orphaned woman who comes to Barcelona to attend university but finds her nights haunted by the strange figures of her aunts and uncles, from artistic, nihilistic Román to violent Juan to the secretive Gloria. It’s a family drama painted all in shadows and dark tones, and I fell deeply in love with Laforet’s writing and with Andrea’s character growth.

Ogawa’s novel The Memory Police was surreal and rich, a fable about memory and surveillance and loss. In Revenge, Ogawa presents a collection of interconnected, webbed short stories that are creepy and suspenseful. It all begins with an aspiring writer who discovers that her new landlady recently murdered her husband; from there, the web casts out in all directions, telling tales of murder, jealousy, crime, and the macabre.

I have read this collection twice now, and its stories continue to haunt me. Enríquez took the gothic horror genre, with all its surreal twists and dark turns, and paired it with social critique. Between the two, Enríquez paints these emotionally arresting and visually haunting stories. I admit that some of these stories left me genuinely scared. Her complex, “difficult” female protagonists and her spell-bending, imaginative plot lines root her tales into the pages.

In this modern-day rendition of the Victorian gothic novel, a post-mortem photographer named Robert must transport his cousin’s remains back to an abandoned chapel for burial. But when he arrives, the woman in charge of the chapel refuses to open it. He’s left in a foggy forest and a cold home, investigating his cousin, the poet Hugh de Bonne, and his wife and muse, Ada. As Robert digs deeper into de Bonne’s story, he will encounter mysterious letters and unexpected disasters, all the while uncovering surprises in his cousin’s past, as well as his own.

Machado’s collection is dreamy, surrealist, dark, and sexual; her writing features women and their bodies, their queerness, and the ways the world turns against women. I swallowed this collection whole in mere hours the first time I read it. Machado writes about a woman with a green ribbon around her neck; a woman listing her lovers as a plague descends on society beyond her island home; about young women mysteriously fading away one by one. It’s an acclaimed collection that deserves even more attention than it already has, for its haunting darkness and vivid imagination.

Carmilla is an absolutely iconic novella in the horror genre from 1872, a forerunner to most of the vampire novels you know and love, even predating Dracula by more than 25 years. It is a rich Gothic tale in which Laura is preyed on by the pale, strange figure of Carmilla, who begs for more and more attachment and love. This early vampire novel is richly homoerotic and sapphic, a slow burn that provides a prototype for the lesbian vampire, and a Halloween must-read for anyone seeking an underrated queer classic and a vampiric slow burn.

I can hear you now: “The author of North and South wrote ghost stories?” She certainly did, and plenty of them: supernatural, eerie stories that use local legends, witchy history, and more to dig into the topics of female identity and the patriarchy through the shadowy lens of the creepy, the supernatural, and the dark. This collection includes classics of hers, such as “The Old Nurse’s Story,” where a strange child roams the moors, and “Lois the Witch,” a tale of jealousy and desire in the atmosphere of the Salem witch hunts.

Socialite Noemí, an intelligent and stubborn woman determined to rebel, leaves her city life behind to visit English mansion High Place, in order to save her cousin, who has been writing her disturbing letters. What she finds will include a fog of eugenic texts, sleep-walking, strange cemeteries, and hallucinatory visions of mushrooms, mold, and ghosts. It’s a classic vivid gothic tale set in Mexico with a fierce heroine, full of velvety darkness and suspense.

Schweblin’s writing is some of the best out there today, and if her novel Fever Dream proved anything, it’s that she has a unique gift for creating an unsettling fluttering feeling of dread in the pit of a reader’s stomach. Mouthful of Birds is a collection of haunting, scary tales, surreal and quietly frightening, eerie and violent. Children turn into butterflies; a daughter begins to eat birds alive. Schweblin’s stories are vivid, absurd, and dream-like—or perhaps, more accurately, nightmarish.