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The gothic novel has one rule: the house is bigger than the people in it, and it knows. Everything else is decoration. Weather, candles, a housekeeper who appears without footsteps. The real estate is the villain, and the heroine’s job is to survive the lease.
I’ve picked five. They span 180 years and they are, in a sense, the same book, which is the highest compliment a genre can be paid. Read them in bad weather. Read them with the curtains drawn so the garden can’t see in. And read them in a house smaller than the one in the book, for comfort.
The original
Jane Eyre
The original. A plain, furious young woman takes a job at Thornfield and discovers that the laughter from the third floor is not the servants.
Everything starts here. Jane is poor, plain, and very angry, and the book lets her be all three without apology, which in 1847 was its own kind of horror. Thornfield Hall is a character: it has a third floor, it has a laugh, it has a fire waiting for the third act. If you have only seen the adaptations, the novel is stranger and meaner and funnier than any of them.
The one that invented the second wife
Rebecca
A young bride arrives at Manderley and finds the previous Mrs de Winter has never quite left. The housekeeper is the scariest thing in English literature and she never raises her voice.
You never learn the narrator’s name. You learn the dead wife’s name in the title. That tells you who the house belongs to. Du Maurier wrote the most famous opening line in the genre and then followed it with 400 pages of a young woman being quietly destroyed by a housekeeper’s manners. Mrs Danvers never raises her voice. She doesn’t have to. The house does it for her.
The one that walks alone
The Haunting of Hill House
Whatever walked there, walked alone. The most quietly terrifying haunted house ever written, with a narrator you will worry about for weeks.
Shirley Jackson is on this list twice because she is the genre’s best writer and I will not pretend otherwise for balance. Hill House is a haunted-house novel in which almost nothing is shown. Doors are found closed that were left open. Something writes on the wall. Eleanor, who has come to be part of a study, starts to feel that the house likes her, and the book’s horror is in how much she wants to be liked.
The one with the wallpaper
Mexican Gothic
A glamorous young woman goes to rescue her cousin from a decaying English family's house in the Mexican mountains. The wallpaper is the least of it.
Noemí is a socialite with a cigarette and a very good coat, and she goes up a mountain to a decaying house called High Place because her cousin has sent a letter that sounds wrong. The family is English, the mine is closed, the wallpaper is moving. Moreno-Garcia takes every piece of the Victorian gothic and makes it about who owns what, and whose bodies the house was built on. It is also extremely entertaining, which gothic forgets to be.
The one with the sisters
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Merricat and Constance live in the big house after a family dinner went badly. The village hates them. Merricat has opinions about the village.
Merricat Blackwood is eighteen, buries things in the garden for luck, and is one of the great narrators in American fiction. She and her sister Constance live alone in the big house after a dinner at which most of the family died of arsenic in the sugar bowl. Constance was acquitted. The village didn’t acquit her. This is the gothic novel told from inside the house, and the house, for once, is on the heroine’s side.
Reading order
If you’ve never read any: Rebecca, then Hill House, then Mexican Gothic. If you’ve read the famous ones: the two Jacksons back to back, then lie down. If it is raining hard and you have the whole weekend: all five, in the order above, with the lamp on and the door hanger out.