Oh my Goth!
Explore the dark allure of gothic literature with our curated book list, featuring classics like Dracula-era tales, The Castle of Otranto, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire—from Polidori to du Maurier.
Book
The Monk
by Matthew Lewis
Set in the sinister monastery of the Capuchins in Madrid, The Monk is a violent tale of ambition, murder, and incest. The great struggle between maintaining monastic vows and fulfilling personal ambitions leads its main character, the monk Ambrosio, to temptation and the breaking of his vows, then to sexual obsession and rape, and finally to murder in order to conceal his guilt. This edition contains a new introduction which shows how Lewis played with convention, ranging from gruesome realism to social comedy, and even parodied the Gothic genre in which he was writing.
Book
Carmilla
by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
The vampire novella "Carmilla" set in Austria is one of Le Fanu's best tales and greatly influenced Bram Stocker, who published Dracula 25 years later. This is definitively a great book and a must for the lovers of horror tales.
Book
The Castle of Otranto
by Horace Walpole
First published pseudonymously in 1764, The Castle of Otranto purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. Walpole gives us a series of catastrophes, ghostly interventions, revelations of identity, and exciting contexts. Emma Clery's new introduction and notes make this the definitive edition.
Book
Rebecca
by Daphne Du Maurier
The young second wife of a widower comes to realize the evil surrounding Rebecca, his first wife.
Book
The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre
by John Polidori
`The Vampyre' was first published in 1819 in the London New Monthly Magazine. The present volume - a companion to Tales of Terror from Blackwood's Magazine in World's Classics - selects thirteen other tales of the macabre first published in the leading London and Dublin magazines between 1819 and 1838. It includes Edward Bulwer's chilling account of the doppelganger, Letitia Landon's elegant reworking of the Gothic romance, William Carleton's terrifying description of an actual lynching, and James Hogg's ghoulish exploitation of the cholera epidemic of 1831-2.
Book
Interview with the Vampire
by Anne Rice
The spellbinding classic that started it all, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author—the inspiration for the hit television series “A magnificent, compulsively readable thriller . . . Rice begins where Bram Stoker and the Hollywood versions leave off and penetrates directly to the true fascination of the myth—the education of the vampire.”—Chicago Tribune Here are the confessions of a vampire. Hypnotic, shocking, and chillingly sensual, this is a novel of mesmerizing beauty and astonishing force—a story of danger and flight, of love and loss, of suspense and resolution, and of the extraordinary power of the senses. It is a novel only Anne Rice could write.
Book
The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
Presents an annotated edition of the novel about Dorian Gray, a handsome youth who is corrupted into a life of terrible evil by Lord Henry Wotton; and includes backgrounds, reviews and reactions, and a selection of critical essays.