10 Great Gothic Thrillers That Will Keep You Up at Night

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 toward 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.

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.

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.

Read our review.