Horror is having a moment. Once confined largely to Halloween, or at least to October, “spooky season” has evolved into a monthslong phenomenon — and our hunger for the frightful doesn’t stop there.
At a time when real life can feel like a nightmare, a collective turn towards the ghoulish and the ghastly might seem counterintuitive, but the Gothic genre has always offered a space to examine the darkest corners of the human psyche. The supernatural happenings that scare us out of our skin are — like the portrait of Dorian Gray — reflections of our own evil as much as anything else. These novels, both old and new, will make you shiver with delight one moment and recoil in hair-raising horror the next.
1. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
In this master class of psychological horror, the naïve second wife of Maxim de Winter grapples with the legacy of his first spouse, Rebecca. Du Maurier makes good use of many of the usual tropes of the Gothic genre, especially uncanny doubling: Relentlessly and unfavorably compared to the Manderley estate’s bewitching former mistress, the nameless narrator is pushed to the brink of sanity by the sinister housekeeper, Mrs Danvers. Secrets bob to the surface like drowning victims from the deep until nobody — not even the reader — can easily separate the terrible truth from even more terrible fictions.
2. The Keep by Jennifer Egan
This book has it all: castles, caves, childhood nightmares dragged back into the light. Grotesque and fantastic, “The Keep” is one of Egan’s more experimental novels, in which two cousins haunted by a childhood prank reunite in a remote village in Eastern Europe to turn its tumbledown castle into an alternative resort. (“The White Lotus” Season 4, anyone?) Egan’s descriptions of the setting are elegant, whimsical and incredibly evocative, conjuring a rare and delightful tale of things that go bump in the night.
3 A Heart So White By Javier Marías
In the late 1700s, many of the earliest Gothic writers turned to Shakespeare for inspiration. Two centuries later, the Spanish writer Marías took a page out of their book with “Corazón tan blanco,” published in English as “A Heart So White,” which borrows not only its title but also many of its major themes from “Macbeth.” After their wedding, Juan, the narrator, and his young wife begin probing his father’s shadowed past, and find blood and betrayal at every turn.
4. Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
One of the strangest novels you will ever read, Murata’s “Earthlings” is impossible to categorise and just as difficult to describe. That’s exactly what makes the book so delicious — and so disturbing. Murata’s hairpin narrative style keeps readers so persistently off-balance that you’ll feel like a Gothic heroine yourself, lost in a maze of blind corners, dead ends and mind-boggling moments. But the darkness lurking at the core of this modern fable about a girl who believes she is an alien is all too real and so eerily familiar that, when the shocking ending arrives, you might not know what to believe.
5. Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler
Like many of the best-known Gothic thrillers of centuries past, “Fledgling” blends genres and bends morality with grisly determination. One part horror, one part science fiction and one part fantasy, this is a refreshingly freaky entry in the overworn category of vampire fiction. As sinister as they are seductive, Butler’s bloodsuckers prey on human frailty as much as human flesh. The novel’s protagonist, Shori, challenges — often violently — assumptions about race, power and desire and every ethical truth you thought you knew. Not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach, “Fledgling” is a slim but sharp-toothed novel unjustly overlooked in Butler’s oeuvre.
6. Sundial by Catriona Ward
Ward’s sun-soaked “Sundial" is Southwestern Gothic at its finest. Childhood horrors and bones long buried splinter into the present when Rob spirits her elder daughter away from their suburban neighbourhood after the remains of house pets and local wildlife start turning up in her bedroom and the 12-year-old’s “silent fury” threatens her younger sister. Rob’s strange and sinister childhood home offers no sanctuary, however: It harbors a dark history of child abuse, dubious animal experimentation and an unnamed evil slinking through the badlands like a snake.
7. The Cement Garden By Ian McEwan
The premise alone is goose bumps grim: After the death of their mother, four children decide to hide her body in a trunk of cement in their basement and fend for themselves rather than surrender to social workers and foster care. What follows is a twisted game of house where familiar familial relationships crumble and new ones take root like nasty black weeds. This one will make your skin crawl.
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
