Piranesi’s house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.
There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.
1905. A year after ‘the affair’ in Dinas Powys, Thomas Bexley has become a drunkard and recluse, haunted by terrible visions of the dead. But when news of a spate of extraordinary kidnappings reaches him, Thomas is shocked to learn that his dear friend and former mentor, Professor Elijah Hawthorn, is the lead suspect.
Discovering a plea for help from Hawthorn claiming to have unearthed a gruesome conspiracy at the heart of the Metropolitan Police, Thomas embarks on a journey to prove Hawthorn’s innocence.
But wherever Thomas goes, he is followed by the dead, and as the mystery of Hawthorn’s disappearance deepens, so too does Thomas’s apparent insanity…
How can Thomas be certain of the truth when he can’t trust anybody around him, not even himself…?
Now, I love Autumn, and I love October, but I hate Halloween and I stopped really reading and watching horror years ago. However, I still wanted to do a Top Five Friday post with a traditional October theme, so I settled on my favourite Gothic stories!
Not only is Frankenstein a great Gothic novel, but it is the first published sci-fi novel. I love the story of how Shelley ended up writing this novel just as much as I love the novel itself. How, one stormy night in Geneva, Switzerland, Mary Shelley, her husband Percy and, Lord Byron’s talks of galvanism and the occult turns into a horror story writing competition. The novel follows Victor Frankenstein in his quest to create life by piecing together body parts and bringing them to life with electricity. However, it doesn’t quite work out the way he imagined it would…
Like most people who have read Frankenstein I first read it because I was studying it at school. Throughout my education I’ve studied the novel around four times, so I’ve read it quite a few times at this point! Now I must admit, as I’ve got older and studied it more the more I grew to love the book. There are just so many different layers to the novel, with many different narrators, that you initially don’t realise if you just know of the several adaptations that have come from this novel now.
Beloved is inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner a black woman who escaped slavery to Ohio with her family. However, they were ultimately found and she made the difficult decision to kill her two-year-old daughter so she wouldn’t be subjected to life in slavery. In Beloved we meet Sethe, a former enslaved woman who is now living with her 18-year-old daughter in a house that is haunted by a spirit who is believed to be the ghost of Sethe’s eldest daughter.
Okay, so this might not be a Gothic novel in the classic sense however as I came across it during my Gothic to Goth module I’m adding it to the list! This was such a beautiful, haunting, novel that I thoroughly enjoyed reading and analysing. Beloved does an excellent job of combining gothic fantasy with the real history of slavery in the U.S. with fantastic and unforgettable characters.
The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is a collection of dark, feminist, fairytales with a seductive twist. Whilst the tales draw upon classic favourites such as “Beauty and the Beast”, “Red Riding Hood” and “Puss in Boots”, they look very different with Carter’s wonderful retelling.
I was lucky enough to study The Bloody Chamber during school, and I’m thrilled I did because otherwise I might not have ever come across this! I adore all of the stories in this collection, I think my favourite one was The Snow Child, it was the first one that I read and it just stuck with me after that. The collection’s titular story, The Bloody Chamber, is a great opening to set the scene for the rest of the collection with a young virgin girl marrying a much older, mysterious, man with a dark secret.
Again, another entry that isn’t immediately what some people might think of as Gothic but GoodReads is telling me it’s Gothic so we’re running with it. This story explores the treatment of mental illness in women in the 19th century through diary entries. However, the treatment of being confined to a room slowly sees our protagonist spiral even more…
I came across The Yellow Wallpaper when I had just finished my A-Levels and I wanted to prepare for my degree by reading generic texts that are usually found on university reading lists. Whilst it’s only a short story it’s impact is no less than a full novel. The diary format is the perfect way to tell this story, it was personal and the reader witnessed the extent of her mind unravelling.
Edgar Allan Poe is revered as one of the best American writers in Gothic fiction, or even the best. I particularly love his short stories as they are brilliantly able to unsettle the reader despite only using a few pages.
My first experience of Edgar Allan Poe was in an episode of The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror when they recreated The Raven. To this day it is still my favourite Edgar Allan Poe work, however, it isn’t one that is included in Selected Tales so I’m sort of cheating by mentioning it. However, I also love many of his other works, hence the addition! From his short stories, I think The Tell-Tale Heart or The Murders of the Rue Morgue are my favourites and ones that I definitely recommend!
Have you read any of the books I’ve mentioned? What are your favourite Gothic reads? Let me know in the comments!
Finnmark, Norway, 1617. Twenty-year-old Maren Magnusdatter stands on the craggy coast, watching the sea break into a sudden and reckless storm. Forty fishermen, including her brother and father, are drowned and left broken on the rocks below. With the menfolk wiped out, the women of the tiny Arctic town of Vardø must fend for themselves.
Three years later, a sinister figure arrives. Absalom Cornet comes from Scotland, where he burned witches in the northern isles. He brings with him his young Norwegian wife, Ursa, who is both heady with her husband’s authority and terrified by it. In Vardø, and in Maren, Ursa sees something she has never seen before: independent women. But Absalom sees only a place untouched by God, and flooded with a mighty evil.
As Maren and Ursa are drawn to one another in ways that surprise them both, the island begins to close in on them, with Absalom’s iron rule threatening Vardø’s very existence.
Inspired by the real events of the Vardø storm and the 1621 witch trials, The Mercies is a story of love, evil, and obsession, set at the edge of civilization.
Firstly, huge thank you to Titan Books and NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Publisher: Titan Books Publication Date: 13/10/2020 Length: 400 pages Genre: Fantasy | Young Adult
CW: n/a
SHE SURVIVED THE CURSE. NOW SHE MUST SURVIVE THE THRONE.
All Ekata wants is to stay alive—and the chance to prove herself as a scholar. Once Ekata’s brother is finally named heir to the dukedom of Kylma Above, there will be nothing to keep her at home with her murderous family. Not her books or her experiments, not her family’s icy castle atop a frozen lake, not even the tantalizingly close Kylma Below, a mesmerizing underwater kingdom that provides her family with magic. But just as escape is within reach, her parents and twelve siblings fall under a strange sleeping sickness, and no one can find a cure.
In the space of a single night, Ekata inherits the title of duke, her brother’s captivating warrior bride, and ever-encroaching challengers from without—and within—her ministry. Nothing has prepared Ekata for diplomacy, for war, for love. . .or for a crown she has never wanted. If Kylma Above is to survive, Ekata must seize her family’s magic and power. And if Ekata is to survive, she must quickly decide how she will wield them both.
This month I managed to stick to my budget and bought reads that I thought was perfect for this season! Some cozy reads mixed in with some darker, gothic, reads as for the shorter, colder, days. Check out the GoodReads description for each title below!
From the author of Before the Coffee Gets Cold comes a story of four new customers each of whom is hoping to take advantage of Cafe Funiculi Funicula’s time-travelling offer.
Among some faces that will be familiar to readers of Kawaguchi’s previous novel, we will be introduced to:
The man who goes back to see his best friend who died 22 years ago The son who was unable to attend his own mother’s funeral The man who travelled to see the girl who he could not marry The old detective who never gave his wife that gift…
The Little House is set in the early years of the Showa era (1926-89), when Japan’s situation is becoming increasingly tense but has not yet fully immersed in a wartime footing. On the outskirts of Tokyo, near a station on a private train line, stands a modest European style house with a red, triangular shaped roof. There, a woman named Taki has worked as a maidservant in the house and lived with its owners, the Hirai family. Now, near the end of her life, Taki is writing down in a notebook her nostalgic memories of the time spent living in the house. Her journal captures the refined middle-class life of the time from her gentle perspective. At the end of the novel, however, a startling final chapter is added.
It has been some years since Jonathan and Mina Harker survived their ordeal in Transylvania and, vanquishing Count Dracula, returned to England to try and live ordinary lives. But shadows linger long in this world of blood feud and superstition – and, the older their son Quincy gets, the deeper the shadows that lengthen at the heart of the Harkers’ marriage. Jonathan has turned back to drink; Mina finds herself isolated inside the confines of her own family; Quincy himself struggles to live up to a family of such high renown. And when a gathering of old friends leads to unexpected tragedy, the very particular wounds in the heart of the Harkers’ marriage are about to be exposed…
When the bodies of two girls are found torn apart in her hometown, Lauren is surprised, but she also expects that the police won’t find the killer. After all, the year before her father’s body was found with his heart missing, and since then everyone has moved on. Even her best friend, Miranda, has become more interested in boys than in spending time at the old ghost tree, the way they used to when they were kids. So when Lauren has a vision of a monster dragging the remains of the girls through the woods, she knows she can’t just do nothing. Not like the rest of her town. But as she draws closer to answers, she realises that the foundation of her seemingly normal town might be rotten at the centre. And that if nobody else stands for the missing, she will.
1686, Iceland. A cold, windswept land where they talk of witches and fear strangers . . .
When Rósa is betrothed to Jón Eiríksson, she is sent to a remote village.
There she finds a man who refuses to speak of his recently deceased first wife, and villagers who view her with suspicion.
Isolated and disturbed by her husband’s strange behaviour, her fears deepen.
What is making the strange sounds in the attic? Who does the mysterious glass figure she is given represent? And why do the villagers talk of the coming winter darkness in hushed tones?
Mia Corvere is only ten years old when she is given her first lesson in death. Destined to destroy empires, the child raised in shadows made a promise on the day she lost everything: to avenge herself on those that shattered her world. But the chance to strike against such powerful enemies will be fleeting, and Mia must become a weapon without equal. Before she seeks vengeance, she must seek training among the infamous assassins of the Red Church of Itreya. Inside the Church’s halls, Mia must prove herself against the deadliest of opponents and survive the tutelage of murderers, liars and daemons at the heart of a murder cult. The Church is no ordinary school. But Mia is no ordinary student. The Red Church is no ordinary school, but Mia is no ordinary student. The shadows love her. And they drink her fear.
Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies.
We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches for the mother he lost – and whom Olive comforts by her mere presence, while her own son feels overwhelmed by her complex sensitivities.
Have you read any of these books? Are any on your own TBR? Let me know in the comments!
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