Emerald Fennell’s newly released (and polarisingly received) adaptation of Wuthering Heights got me thinking about how beguilingly we've entered a Gothic revival in pop culture.

We’ve had a new cinematic reimagining of Nosferatu (a famously unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula) and Guillermo del Toro – the moster movie king – directed his version of Frankenstein. Sarah Snook held centre stage entirely on her own as all 26 character in an adapted one-woman-play of The Picture of Dorian Gray; Ryan Coogler's contemporary Southern Gothic film Sinners has become the most Oscar-nominated film of all time – and there's even a reimagining of Edgar Allen Poe's The Masque of Red Death on the horizon, starring Lea Seydoux and Mikey Madison.

What strikes me is how little these stories have had to change to feel compelling to a modern audience. The Gothic has always been about isolation, repression, obsession, haunted spaces – things that don’t really go out of fashion. So if you're feeling inspired by the discourse around these films, plays and revamped adaptations taking over our imaginations and public discourse right now – then these are 19 of the best Gothic novels to add to your reading list.

1. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

If you want the full force of English Gothic – windswept moors, star-crossed lovers, and a brooding, unknowable hero – I'd tell you to reach for Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff is the quintessential Gothic leading man, all moral turpitude and doomed devotion and the prose from Brontë is second-to-none. For a classic, the language is surprisingly easy to sink into (bar Joseph's illiterate drawl, but it's worth bearing through his parts), and you'll be surprised to find that there's another entire half of the book famously untouched by any of its multiple cinematic reimaginings.

2. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

I'd suggest reading this not only because it may be the first true science fiction novel, but because it is unapologetically, gloriously Gothic: grave-robbing, blasphemous experimentation, alienation, revenge, doomed romance, murder – shall I go on? It's as much about creation as it is about isolation – Frankenstein’s monster condemned to wander friendless, and Victor himself spiritually exiled after banishing his own creation. I'd suggest seeking out the original 1818 text (once heavily edited before publication), to enjoy Shelley’s masterpiece in its rawest form.

3. Dracula by Bram Stoker

You may think you know Dracula – you probably don’t. The Count here is no suave cinematic charmer but a bloodsucking, foul-breathed sadist intent on claiming England (and perhaps the world). It endures precisely because it is so Gothic: mysterious, monstrous, saturated in dread – and honestly, it’s a pity how many people admire its reputation without ever meeting the real creature on the page.

4. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Dorian’s face remains luminous while his portrait grows pock-marked with every sin. Wilde's novel isn’t overtly terrifying, yet it teems with dread and decadence, which is why it's the perfect fin-de-siècle Gothic novel. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants their Gothic plot laced with aestheticism and moral rot rather than cobwebs and jump scares.

5. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Give us a quiet but strong-willed heroine in a shadowy English manor and we're sold. Jane Eyre feels like Gothic filtered through a more emotional intimacy. The Brontë sisters trail-blazed the form – here the romance, the madness, and the creaking corridors all coexist in perfect balance.

6. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

“Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again” – and honestly, so have I. Du Maurier pulls us into that dark, dangerous house through the unnamed narrator’s fragile devotion. Manderley is biography, confession, and crime scene all at once. (If you like this one, I'd also suggest her short story The Birds.)

7. Beloved by Toni Morrison

Don’t sleep on Southern Gothic. If the genre is about being haunted, then Beloved might be the most devastating version of it you'll read. Morrison rethinks the ghost story through the impact of slavery, turning haunting into something historical and psychological. I'd recommend this one because it expands what the genre can do, and because it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and the Novel Prize for Literature in 1993 for very good reasons.

8. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Hill House will unsettle you in a way very few books manage to. It’s not about things jumping out at you; it’s about psychological erosion. Jackson was a master of the ghost story. (I would pair this with We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and follow it with a watch of the 2018 Netflix adaptation of The Haunting of Hill House starring Victoria Pedretti.)

9. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

Reading this feels like stepping onto unstable ground. This is a 1898 horror novella by Henry James that first appeared in serial format in Collier's Weekly magazine. A governess, a crumbling house, two children, and the possibility of ghosts – yet the real tension lies in never quite knowing whether what she sees is real. I recommend it because it’s deliberately destabilising; the characters don’t know the truth, and neither do we, and that uncertainty is the entire point.

10. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo

I think you'll enjoy this far more than you might expect to – especially given how often people mock Hugo’s endless digressions. Hugo wasn’t accidentally info-dumping – he was making sure you understood the city, the architecture, and Notre-Dame itself as if they were living characters with a biography. It’s also much funnier than it gets credit for – Quasimodo’s court scene and Frollo’s melodramatic self-pity will genuinely make you laugh – and by the end, you'll feel like you know medieval Paris in a way you didn’t before.

11. The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe

It’s so short. Just read it. A prince seals himself and his aristocratic friends inside a castle while a plague ravages the country, throws a lavish masquerade across seven colour-coded rooms, and convinces himself they’re untouchable. It resurfaced in pop culture in 2020 for obvious reasons, and with A24 now developing a wildly revisionist adaptation directed by Charlie Polinger and starring Léa Seydoux and Mikey Madison, it clearly still strikes a nerve.

12. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole

Often labelled the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto was initially published by Walpole anonymously in 1764, pretending it was based on a sixteenth-century Neapolitan manuscript, only to claim authorship later when it proved popular –at which point critics promptly turned on it. I have a soft spot for the 1796 Jeffrey edition with the coloured illustrations (the first to include them).

13. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Well over 200 years after it was written, this is still one of Austen's best and most enjoyable novels (and also, the author's first completed novel). It's fast paced, genuinely funny and beautifully written. It can be read as a sort of satire about a girl who reads so many Gothic novels she begins to think she’s in one. But there are also some pretty interesting dissertations online – like this one from The Paris Review – that delve a little deeper into its meaning.

14. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Victorian Gothic, distilled into a novella. The idea of doubling – of a respectable doctor splitting himself into something monstrous – has shaped how we think about the genre ever since. What I personally love is how matter-of-fact this book feels; Stevenson's prose doesn’t over-explain. In fact, sitting at a mere 80 pages in length, it deals with remarkably deep themes exploring good vs. evil / man vs. hubris.

15. The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux

Originally serialised in French newspapers in a similar manner to the original Sherlock Holmes books (which explains why every chapter seems to end on a cliffhanger) this is such a compulsive read. Leroux’s background as a journalist shows in the mock-investigative tone, and the theatre managers will genuinely crack you up amid all the mystery and subterranean menace. It’s melodramatic, yes –but it’s also sharp, funny, and far more suspenseful on the page than people expect.

16. Vathek by William Beckford

For something slightly different, Vathek offers an early Gothic story filtered through an Arabian setting. Beckford wrote it in French in 1782, and it wasn’t even attributed to him in England for several editions, which only adds to its strange history. There's a beautiful 1834 Bentley’s Standard Novels edition which, if you can get your hands on it, has these beautiful romantic oriental illustrations that capture the excess and moral decay of Caliph Vathek perfectly.

17. Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

Wise Blood might be one of the greatest American debut novels, and Hazel Motes – whom O’Connor once described as "the kind of saint the modern American South would produce" – is endlessly fascinating in it. Anyone who's ever wrestled with belief will be drawn to how O’Connor writes atheists: they often become the most rigidly “religious” in their convictions, and Hazel’s eventual self-imposed penance makes him more spiritually intense than the fraud he tries to outdo.

18. The Rats in the Walls by H. P. Lovecraft

The ending of the story still definitely makes you lose your sanity for a while, but this is absolutely one of the best non-Mythos stories from Lovecraft. This one starts in familiar Gothic territory – an ancestral home, a crumbling priory – and then tips into something much more Lovecraftian. The constant sound of rats in the walls becomes an obsession, and when the narrator finally uncovers what lies beneath Exham Priory, the descent into madness feels earned and deeply unsettling.

19. The Monk by Matthew Lewis

Published in 1796 – when Lewis was just nineteen! – The Monk was scandalous from the start, condemned as “lewd and blasphemous,” attacked by English poet and literary critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and heavily edited in later editions to tone it down. The relationship between Ambrosio and Matilda spirals into manipulation, lust, and spiritual corruption, and yes, parts of it are over-the-top. But that excess is part of the appeal – if you ask me. And this book really cemented the Gothic’s taste for transgression. I can’t help admiring how unapologetic it originally was.

20. The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

You can’t really talk about Gothic without mentioning Radcliffe. Emily St. Aubert’s removal to a remote castle under the control of a dubious Italian nobleman is the blueprint for so much that follows – isolated heroine, oppressive landscape, secrets hidden in corridors. It’s a bit of a potboiler at times, but its influence is undeniable, and I recommend it because understanding Udolpho makes the entire tradition that follows it make more sense.

Searching for more depraved and horrifying literature recommendations? Check out our list of 20 spooky horror and Halloween books on our reading list.