Reading list
The best gothic novels
Gothic fiction began in 1764 with a giant helmet falling out of the sky onto a wedding, and it has never really stopped. Castles, crumbling family houses, locked rooms, doubles, vampires and a heroine who keeps hearing things at night: these are the novels that set the furniture in place.
21 books, all free to read
The ranking weighs how much each book still frightens or grips against how much it shaped what came after. Every one is free to read here, and the long ones are easier than their page counts suggest when you take them a few screens at a time.
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1. Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley
Written for a ghost-story contest on a wet summer in 1816, it gave us the mad scientist and a monster who is the most articulate person in the book.
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2. Dracula
by Bram Stoker
Told in diaries, letters and newspaper cuttings, so the dread builds the way a real panic would. Every vampire since owes it rent.
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3. Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
A love story so fierce it reads like a haunting, set on moors where the weather is a character and the dead do not stay put.
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4. Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
A governess, a brooding master and a laugh from the attic: the gothic house seen through the eyes of a woman who refuses to be its victim.
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5. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson
The great story of the double, short enough to read in an evening, and still the best picture of a respectable man's other self.
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6. The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
A portrait ages so its owner does not. Wilde's only novel is witty on the surface and rotten underneath, which is exactly the point.
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7. The Turn of the Screw
by Henry James
A governess, two children and two ghosts, or none. The most argued-over ghost story ever written, because it never tells you.
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8. The Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole
Where it all starts: a usurper, a prophecy and a castle that seems to want him out. Short and strange, and the template for everything here.
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9. The Mysteries of Udolpho
by Ann Radcliffe
The book that made gothic a bestseller: a heroine, a villain's castle in the Apennines and the black veil she should not lift.
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10. The Monk
by M. G. Lewis
Written at nineteen to outdo Radcliffe, and it does: a pious monk falls fast and far. Still shocking, and meant to be.
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11. Northanger Abbey
by Jane Austen
Austen teasing the gothic craze, with a heroine who has read too much Udolpho. Read it after the real thing for the full joke.
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12. Short Fiction with Carmilla
by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
Le Fanu's tales, with Carmilla among them: the vampire story that came twenty-five years before Dracula, and influenced it.
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13. The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins
Gothic moved into the Victorian drawing room: a woman in white on a moonlit road, a swapped identity and a magnificent villain.
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14. The Phantom of the Opera
by Gaston Leroux
A ghost in the Paris Opera who turns out to be a man, and a love triangle under the stage. Pulp, but gorgeous pulp.
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15. Melmoth the Wanderer
by Charles Robert Maturin
Tales inside tales about a man who sold his soul for a long life and spends it trying to pass the bargain on. The last great gothic novel.
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16. Uncle Silas
by J. Sheridan Le Fanu
An heiress is sent to live with a sinister uncle in a decaying house. Slow, then suffocating, then hard to put down.
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17. The House of the Seven Gables
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hawthorne brings the curse home to New England: a house built on a stolen plot, and two centuries of the family paying for it.
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18. Short Fiction with The Fall of the House of Usher
by Edgar Allan Poe
All of Poe's stories, with The Fall of the House of Usher, the purest gothic tale in English, in twenty pages.
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19. Vathek
by William Beckford
An Arabian Nights caliph goes looking for the powers of darkness and finds them. Lurid and funny, and written in three days, the author claimed.
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20. The Vampire
by John William Polidori
Written the same summer as Frankenstein, and the first vampire in English prose: a cold aristocrat, not yet a count.
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21. The Beetle
by Richard Marsh
Outsold Dracula in its year: an ancient Egyptian horror loose in London, told by four witnesses who each see a different part of it.
Read it as a path: Gothic horror
Castles, vampires and doubles: the line that runs from Otranto to Dracula.
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