If you would like to read a Lovecraft tale without all the racism and with a lesbian protagonist, The Red Tree is your book. Focusing on floundering writer Sarah Crowe as she flees her native Georgia to rent a farm house in Rhode Island, it’s redolent with classic Gothic ambiance and dread. The past won’t die and who can tell what is even happening in the present? Certainly not Sarah, as she becomes obsessed with the foreboding old oak tree on the property, and the manuscript she found in the basement tracing the tree’s sinister history.

Hauntings, dreams, unreliable narration, literary allusions galore, that scary tree... I devoured this. It’s a book with that hard-to-describe sense of magnitude, the feeling that the story transcends the bounds of being encased in paper and ink, that there is so much more going on. Which makes the horror all the more unsettling.

An instant favorite.