The Ultimate Gothic Horror Reading List
Gothic horror gave us some of literature's most enduring characters — Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, Mr. Hyde, Dorian Gray. These books defined a genre and shaped the horror that followed. Here is the essential reading list, in recommended reading order.
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley, 1818 — Start Here
The ur-text of gothic horror and science fiction both. A 21-year-old woman wrote this and invented two genres simultaneously. The monster's humanity haunts the reader long after the final page.
Get this book →Dracula
Bram Stoker, 1897
Epistolary, atmospheric, relentlessly suspenseful. More terrifying than its many adaptations suggest. Stoker's count is genuinely frightening, not romantic.
Get this book →The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886
The definitive duality-of-human-nature novel. Stevenson wrote it in six days in a fever dream. Read it in one sitting as he intended.
Get this book →The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde, 1890
Gothic aestheticism — Wilde at his most wickedly brilliant. A novel about beauty, corruption, and the price of vanity dressed in prose of crystalline wit.
Get this book →The Turn of the Screw
Henry James, 1898
Masterfully ambiguous. Are the ghosts real, or is the governess mad? James never answers. That ambiguity is the horror.
Get this book →Get the Gothic Horror Collection
All 6 gothic horror classics in one beautifully formatted bundle. Save over 40%.
Gothic Horror Collection →