101 Gothic Reads You Might Enjoy

101 Gothic reads from the 18th century onwards. How many have you read?

Disclaimer: This is a list the leans into my expertise (18th and 19th century British Gothic and Gothic romance). There are some examples of multiple books for one author – that’s because I’ve read them! I think they’re fascinating or they’re pretty well-known works. It’s not a definitive list and any other Gothic scholar or fan’s list would be different! This isn’t a ‘should have read’ or a ‘must read’

1. The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole – 1764
2. The Old English Baron – Charlotte Reeve – 1778 (version originally published as The Champion of Virtue in 1777)
3. The Recess – Sophia Lee – 1783-5
4. A Sicilian Romance – Ann Radcliffe – 1790
5. Romance of the Forest – Ann Radcliffe – 1791
6. The Castle of Wolfenbach – Eliza Parsons – 1793
7. The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe – 1794
8. Things as They Are, or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams – William Godwin – 1794
9. The Monk – Matthew Lewis – 1796
10. The Children of the Abbey – Regina Maria Roche – 1796
11. The Italian – Ann Radcliffe – 1796
12. The Mysterious Warning – Eliza Parsons – 1796
13. The Castle Spectre – Matthew Lewis (play) – 1797
14. Wieland, or The Transformation – Charles Brockden Brown – 1798
15. Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman – Mary Wollstonecraft – 1798
16. The Abbess – William Henry Ireland – 1799
17. Castle Rackrent – Maria Edgeworth – 1800
18. Zofloya, or The Moor – Charlotte Dacre – 1806
19. The Count of Montabino – Sarah Wilkinson (chapbook) – 1809
20. ‘The Vampyre’ – John Stagg (poem) – 1810
21. Zastrozzi – Percy Shelley – 1810
22. Christabel – Samuel Taylor Coleridge (poem) – 1816
23. Mandeville – William Godwin – 1817
24. Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen – 1817
25. ‘The Sandman’ – E T A Hoffman (short story) – 1817
26. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley – 1819/1831
27. Nightmare Abbey – Thomas Love Peacock – 1819
28. ‘The Vampyre’ – John Polidori (short story) – 1819
29. ‘The Black Vampyre’ – Uriah Derek D’Arcy (short story) – 1819
30. Melmoth the Wanderer – Charles Maturin – 1820
31. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner – James Hogg – 1824
32. Demon – Mikhail Lermontov (poem) – 1829-39
33. The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo – 1831
34. ‘The Queen of Spades’ – Alexander Pushkin (short story) – 1832
35. ‘Young Goodman Brown’ – Nathaniel Hawthorne (short story) – 1835
36. ‘The Sylph’ – Vladimir Odoesvkii – 1837
37. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ – Edgar Allan Poe (short story) – 1839
38. ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ – Edgar Allan Poe (short story) – 1842
39. The Black Spider – Jeremias Gotthelf (novella) – 1842
40. ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ – Edgar Allan Poe (short story) – 1843
41. Varney the Vampire – commonly attributed to James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest – 1845-7
42. String of Pearls – (Penny Dreadful) – 1846-7
43. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – 1847
44. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – 1847
45. The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne – 1851
46. ‘The Old Nurse’s Story’ – Elizabeth Gaskell (short story) – 1852
47. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins – 1858
48. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – 1861
49. Uncle Silas – Sheridan Le Fanu – 1864
50. ‘Carmilla’ – Sheridan Le Fanu (novella) – 1872
51. ‘The Body Snatcher’ – Robert Louis Stevenson – 1881
52. Weird Stories – Charlotte Riddell – 1882
53. The House of Ulloa – Emilia Pardo Bazan – 1886
54. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson (novella) – 1886
55. ‘The Horla’ – Guy de Maupassant (short story) – 1887
56. ‘Let Loose’ – Mary Colmondeley (short story)- 1890
57. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde – 1890
58. ‘A Wicked Voice’ – Vernon Lee (short story) – 1890
59. ‘The Damned Thing’ – Ambrose Bierce (short story) – 1893
60. ‘The Great God Pan’ – Arthur Machen (novella) – 1894
61. ‘The Crimson Weaver’ – Robert Murray Gilchrist (short story) – 1895
62. The King in Yellow – Robert Chambers – 1895
63. ‘The Hungry Stones’ – Rabindranath Tagore (short story) – 1895
64. ‘The Library Window’ – Margaret Oliphant (short story) – 1896
65. The Beetle – Richard Marsh – 1897
66. Dracula – Bram Stoker – 1897
67. the Turn of the Screw – Henry James (novella) – 1898
68. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle – 1902
69. ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ – W. W. Jacobs (short story) – 1902
70. Ghost Stories of an Antiquary – M. R. James – 1904
71. ‘For the Blood is the Life’ – Francis Marion Crawford (short story) – 1905
72. ‘Lazarus’ – Leonid Andreyev (short story) – 1906
73. ‘The Willows’ – Algernon Blackwood – 1907
74. ‘The Shadow’ – Edith Nesbit (short story) – 1910
75. ‘The Eyes’ – Edith Wharton (short story) – 1910
76. ‘The Beckoning Fair One’ – Oliver Onions (short story) – 1911
77. ‘Outside the House’ – Bessie Kiffin Taylor (short story) – 1920
78. Footsteps in the Dark – Georgette Heyer – 1832
79. Jamaica Inn – Daphne Du Maurier – 1936
80. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – 1938
81. And Then There Were None – Agatha Christie – 1939
82. The Bishop of Hell – Marjorie Bowen – 1949
83. My Cousin Rachel – Daphne Du Maurier – 1951
84. Moura – Virginia Coffman – 1959
85. The Haunting of Hill House – Shirley Jackson – 1959
86. Thunder Heights – Phyllis Whitney – 1960
87. The Mistress of Mellyn – Victoria Holt – 1960
88. Picnic at Hanging Rock – Joan Lindsay – 1969
89. The Silence of Herondale – Joan Aiken – 1975
90. Interview with the Vampire – Anne Rice – 1976
91. Flowers in the Attic – Virginia Andrews – 1979
92. Gaywyck – Vincent Virga – 1980
93. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer – Patrick Suskind – 1985
94. Beloved – Toni Morrison – 1987
95. The Little Stranger – Sarah Waters – 2009
96. The Essex Serpent – Sarah Perry – 2016
97. The Apple Tree Throne – Premee Mohamed (novella) – 2018
98. The Monster of Elendhaven – Jennifer Giesbrecht – 2019
99. Mexican Gothic – Silvia Moreno Garcia – 2020
100. Dowry of Blood – S. T. Gibson – 2021
101. The Feast of Innocents – Colina Harker – 2022

I’m going to do another list more focused on the 20th and 21st centuries so keep an eye out!