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Gothic fiction: Home

Info on the subject of Gothic Fiction - what it is, where to find it in the Sophia Library collection, and recommendations

Gothic fiction

What Gothic Fiction titles does Sophia Library have?

Click here to access a list of the Gothic fiction titles Sophia Library has in the collection!

Gothic on Screen!

Have you enjoyed watching Edward Scissorhands? If so, why not take a look at some of these movies that are in a similar vein?

  • The Addams Family: The eccentrically macabre family moves to a bland suburb where Wednesday Addams' friendship with the daughter of a hostile and conformist local reality show host exacerbates conflict between the families. (Scroll down on the IMDB page to see other versions of their stories!)
  • Coraline: An adventurous 11-year-old girl finds another world that is a strangely idealized version of her frustrating home, but it has sinister secrets.
  • Corpse Bride: When a shy groom practices his wedding vows in the inadvertent presence of a deceased young woman, she rises from the grave assuming he has married her. (This one is also directed by Scissorhands' Tim Burton!)
  • Frankenweenie: When a boy's beloved dog passes away suddenly, he attempts to bring the animal back to life through a powerful science experiment.
  • Hotel Transylvania: Dracula, who operates a high-end resort away from the human world, goes into overprotective mode when a boy discovers the resort and falls for the count's teenaged daughter.
  • Igor: Animated fable about a cliché hunchbacked evil scientist's assistant who aspires to become a scientist himself, much to the displeasure of the rest of the evil science community.
  • A Little Princess: A young girl is relegated to servitude at a boarding school when her father goes missing and is presumed dead. (This isn't necessarily a very Gothic story, but this director brings a Gothic feel to it in this movie.)
  • The Nightmare before Christmas: Jack Skellington, king of Halloween Town, discovers Christmas Town, but his attempts to bring Christmas to his home causes confusion.
  • Paranorman: A misunderstood boy takes on ghosts, zombies and grown-ups to save his town from a centuries-old curse.
  • Warm Bodies: After a highly unusual zombie saves a still-living girl from an attack, the two form a relationship that sets in motion events that might transform the entire lifeless world.

Top Ten features of Gothic Literature

Gothic Fiction recommendations


 

 

 

 

 

Doll Bones by Holly Black
Horror Fiction - F BLAC
Twelve-year-old Zach is too old to play with toys. Or at least, that's what his father thinks. But even though he stops hanging out with Poppy and Alice, stops playing with his action figures, it's no good. There's one toy that still wants to play with him. A doll that's made from the bones of a dead girl. The only way to end the game is to lay the doll to rest for ever. It's time for a journey to Spring Grove cemetery. It's time to grow up.

 

 

 

 

 

Strange Star by Emma Carroll
Horror Fiction - F CARR
Switzerland, 1816.
On a stormy summer night, Lord Byron and his guests are gathered round the fire. Felix, their serving boy, can't wait to hear their creepy tales.
Yet real life is about to take a chilling turn - more chilling than any tale.
Frantic pounding at the front door reveals a stranger, a girl covered in the most unusual scars. She claims to be looking for her sister, supposedly snatched from England by a woman called Mary Shelley.
Someone else has followed her here too, she says.
And the girl is terrified.

 

 

 

 

 

Coraline - Neil Gaiman
Horror Fiction - F GAIM
The day after they moved in, Coraline went exploring...
In Coraline's family's new flat are twenty-one windows and fourteen doors. Thirteen of the doors open and close.
The fourteenth is locked, and on the other side is only a brick wall, until the day Coraline unlocks the door to find a passage to another flat in another house just like her own.
Only it's different.
At first, things seem marvelous in the other flat. The food is better. The toy box is filled with wind-up angels that flutter around the bedroom, books whose pictures writhe and crawl and shimmer, little dinosaur skulls that chatter their teeth. But there's another mother, and another father, and they want Coraline to stay with them and be their little girl. They want to change her and never let her go.
Other children are trapped there as well, lost souls behind the mirrors. Coraline is their only hope of rescue. She will have to fight with all her wits and all the tools she can find if she is to save the lost children, her ordinary life, and herself.

 

 

 

 

 

The Woman in Black - Susan Hill
Classics - CLASSICS - HILL
"I did not believe in ghosts".
Few attend Mrs Alice Drablow's funeral, and not one blood relative amongst them. There are undertakers with shovels, of course, a local official who would rather be anywhere else, and one Mr Arthur Kipps, solicitor from London. He is to spend the night in Eel Marsh House, the place where the old recluse died amidst a sinking swamp, a blinding fog and a baleful mystery about which the townsfolk refuse to speak.
Young Mr Kipps expects a boring evening alone sorting out paperwork and searching for Mrs Drablow's will. But when the high tide pens him in, what he finds – or rather what finds him – is something else entirely.

 

 

 

 

 

The haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson
Classics - CLASSICS JACK
Luke Sanderson, inheritor of the mysterious Hill House, invites a supernatural investigator and several guests interested in the paranormal to his eighty-year-old mansion in the hopes that they can experience and record supernatural events. As time passes, the group experiences increasingly terrifying and unexplainable disturbances, and one guest - Eleanor Vance - seems to be a particular target of the strange occurrences. 

 

 

 

 

 

Fairytales for Wilde Girls - Allyse Near
Other Realities Fiction - F NEAR
'He's gone the same way as those little birds that bothered me with their awful songs! And you will too, you and your horrible heart-music, because you won't stay out of my woods!'
There's a dead girl in a birdcage in the woods. That's not unusual. Isola Wilde sees a lot of things other people don't. But when the girl appears at Isola's window, her every word a threat, Isola needs help.
Her real-life friends – Grape, James and new boy Edgar – make her forget for a while. And her brother-princes – magical creatures seemingly lifted from the pages of the French fairytales Isola idolises – will protect her with all the fierce love they possess.
It may not be enough.
Isola needs to uncover the truth behind the dead girl's demise . . . before the ghost steals Isola's last breath.

 

 

 

 

 

His hideous heart: thirteen of Edgar Allan Poe's most unsettling tales reimagined - edited by Dahlia Adler
Horror Fiction - F HISH
Thirteen of YA's most celebrated names reimagine Edgar Allan Poe's most surprising, unsettling, and popular tales for a new generation.
Edgar Allan Poe may be a hundred and fifty years beyond this world, but the themes of his beloved works have much in common with modern young adult fiction. Whether the stories are familiar to readers or discovered for the first time, readers will revel in Edgar Allan Poe's classic tales, and how they've been brought to life in 13 unique and unforgettable ways.
Contributors include Kendare Blake (reimagining "Metzengerstein"), Rin Chupeco ("The Murders in the Rue Morge"), Lamar Giles ("The Oval Portrait"), Tessa Gratton ("Annabel Lee"), Tiffany D. Jackson ("The Cask of Amontillado"), Stephanie Kuehn ("The Tell-Tale Heart"), Emily Lloyd-Jones ("The Purloined Letter"), Hillary Monahan ("The Masque of the Red Death"), Marieke Nijkamp ("Hop-Frog"), Caleb Roehrig ("The Pit and the Pendulum"), and Fran Wilde ("The Fall of the House of Usher").

 

 

 

 


Frankenstein, or, The modern Prometheus - Mary Shelley
Classics - CLASSICS SHEL
Written when Mary Shelley was only nineteen-years old, this chilling tale of a young scientist's desire to create life still resonates today. Victor Frankenstein's monster is stitched together from the stolen limbs of the dead, and the result is a grotesque being who, rejected by his maker, sets out on a journey to reek his revenge. In the most famous gothic horror story ever told, Shelley confronts the limitations of science, the nature of human cruelty and the pathway to forgiveness with rich language and evocative imagery.

Quick Reference: Features of Gothic

  • Unnerving Atmosphere
  • A Young, Innocent Hero(ine)
  • Societal Taboos
  • Supernatural/Paranormal Activity
  • Nightmares
  • Anti-hero
  • Damsel in Distress
  • Social Upheaval
  • Power & Restraint
  • The Sublime
  • Dark, Oppressive and/or Extreme Setting
  • A Villain/Monster
  • Mystery & Fear
  • Omens/Curses
  • Emotional Distress
  • Romance
  • The Uncanny
  • Doubles/Recurrences
  • Place & Time
  • Grim Weather (freezing rain/oppressive heat)