‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ is a 1966 novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. This novel is a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s Gothic novel ‘Jane Eyre’. This book explores the power of ‘relationships between men and women, themes of race, Caribbean history, and assimilation as the main character is caught in a white patriarchal society.

This work is considered a feminist work, and takes the gothic genre to a new location: the Caribbean. Proving that you don’t always need overcast English skies and boggy moors to do the genre justice. 

‘King’s vampire story Salem’s Lot is a critical and popular success. The author was lauded for breathing new life into the traditional vampire story by incorporating modern fears and realistic settings.’

‘Anne Rice establishes the idea of the sympathetic vampire. Rice’s vampire couple, introspective, guilt ridden narrator Louis and charismatic, amoral anti-hero Lestat are far removed from the traditional idea of the vampire. This paves the way for the brooding romantic vampire found in modern popular culture.’

This is a collection of short stories by English writer Angela Carter. Featuring gothic and feminist retellings of well known fairytales such as Bluebeard, and Beauty and the Beast. Exploring Gothic themes including i*est, violence, and the objectification of women. 

“My intention was not to do “versions” or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, ‘adult’ fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories.” - Angela Carter

The Woman in Black is a gothic horror novel by English writer Susan Hill, about a mysterious spectre that haunts a small English town.

Featuring a haunted house that is surrounded by an eerie landscape of dark English marshes, accessible by a causeway which floods with the tide, trapping the main character in the haunted house.

It is written in the frame narrative classic of gothic literature, and features descriptive gothic prose. 

Beloved is a Gothic novel by Black Woman American writer Toni Morrison. The novel involves various Gothic elements under a background of slavery in the USA. ‘Following the convention of fear and horror in gothic narrative on the basis of the supernatural intervention, this novel further suggests a changed attitude towards the image of the Gothic from a loathsome existence to a hint of optimism at the end of the novel.’ - Continue reading here

The novel deals with themes of otherness and the horrors of slavery. Not just your typical haunted house story, ‘as is made clear by the arrival of Beloved in the flesh. The sudden appearance of mysterious strangers or distant relatives is a common Gothic trope. But when Sethe arrives home one day to find a young woman on her doorstep, it soon becomes clear that this woman is no stranger. She calls herself Beloved and has an intimate knowledge of Sethe’s history, which leads Sethe to believe that she is a physical incarnation of her murdered daughter. This version of Beloved is a supernatural femme fatale - an undead malevolent force appearing in the guise of a beautiful woman.’

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A cult favourite this 700 pages novel ‘redefines Gothic for the twenty-first century. The novel brings many traditional elements of Gothic together, while turning the process of reading itself into a labyrinth with convoluted footnotes, different typefaces, elaborate arrangements of text on the page, and passages in code, mirror writing, musical notation, and braille.’