Each week we have a book group on Mondays and Tuesdays. There are two slots: 10 am Tuesday and 7 pm Monday (BST) and you’re very welcome to either, wherever you are in the world and however much you’d like to participate. To sign up get in touch with @RomGothSam on twitter or send an email to sam@romancingthegothic.com
From April, meetings will be held at 7pm on Mondays and then 10am on Tuesdays
SIGN UP for individual author visits here
9th/10th February
This week’s read is an unusual short story collection. Published in Household Words in 1859, The Haunted House is a related collections of stories by different authors in the same house. It includes works by Charles Dickens, Hesba Stretton, George Augustus Sala, Adelaide Anne Procter, Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell.
You can find and read each story here
16th/17th February
We’re going back in time to explore what the early 19th century thought about ghosts with some ‘true’ stories and tales…
You can read this short chapbook here.
23rd/24th February
For the last week of ghost writing month, we’re reading Nuzo Onoh’s Where the Dead Brides Gather
Bata, an eleven-year-old girl tormented by nightmares, wakes up one night to find herself standing sentinel before her cousin’s door. Her skin, hair, and eyes have turned a dazzling white colour, which even the medicine-man can’t heal. Her cousin is to get married the next morning, but only if she can escape the murderous attack of a ghost-bride, who used to be engaged to her groom.
Through the night, Bata battles the vengeful ghost and finally vanquishes it before collapsing. On awakening, she has no recollection of the events. And when the medicine-man tries to exorcise the entities clinging to her body as a result of her supernatural possession, Bata dies on the exorcism mat. There begins her journey. She is taken into Ibaja-La, the realm of dead brides, by Mmuọ-Ka-Mmuọ, the ghost-collector of the spirit realm. There she meets the ghosts of brides from every culture who died tragically before their weddings; both the kind and the malevolent. Bata is given secret powers to fight the evil ghost-brides before being sent back to the human realm, where she must learn to harness her new abilities as she strives to protect those whom she loves.
2nd/3rd March
This month’s theme is ‘Introductions’ to a variety of more or less Gothic topics! The first class, we’re joined by B. Rae Grosz to take the queen of American mystery fiction Mary Roberts Rinehart. We’ll be reading her classic Red Lamp.
William Porter has just inherited a seaside manor. As an academic, he doesn’t believe the rumours that it is haunted – nor is he suspicious of the circumstances behind the inheritance – after all, lots of people die suddenly from heart attacks, and his uncle Horace was just unlucky.
His wife, however, refuses to live in the main house and will only move into the lodge elsewhere on the grounds. And she may be right: soon after they arrive, Porter sees a shadowy figure illuminated by the red glow of Horace’s writing lamp, the very light that shone on the scene of his death.
Even Porter’s scepticism is tested to the limit when a rash of murders occurs across the countryside. And if Porter isn’t very careful, he risks implicating himself in the crimes he hopes to solve.
9th/10th March
This week’s theme is Urban Fantasy.
Sonokrom, a village in the Ghanaian hinterland, has not changed for hundreds of years. Here, the men and women speak the language of the forest, drink aphrodisiacs with their palm wine and walk alongside the spirits of their ancestors. The discovery of sinister remains – possibly human, definitely ‘evil’ – and the disappearance of a local man brings the intrusion of the city in the form of Kayo, a young forensic pathologist convinced that scientific logic can shatter even the most inexplicable of mysteries.
As old and new worlds clash and clasp, and Kayo and his sidekick, Constable Garba, delve deeper into the case, they discover a truth that leaves scientific explanations far behind.
16th/17th March
It’s that Georgette Heyer time of the year again! One of her least popular works but we tend to like her most reviled offerings so… I hope for great things. One of her queerest historicals with lots of court intrigue in the background!
The book is set at the court of Charles II, in the era after which he has returned to a grateful nation after his years of exile due to Oliver Cromwell’s Puritanical regime.
The book stars the Marquis of Roxhythe, a courtier and master manipulator who works behind the scenes to further his beloved King’s agenda.
You can read it here
Romancing the Gothic 