10 Great Gothic Thrillers That Will Keep You Up at Night – The New York Times
Image from the article in the New York Times
M.L. Rio, best-selling author of If We Were Villains and Graveyard Shift, wrote a super article for the New York Times a few days ago, in which she named her top ten gothic thrillers.
At one time, Horror was mainly confined to October and Halloween, but recently, people's hunger for the frightful hasn't stopped there. Here is what M.L. Rio has to say:
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.
The first novel in the list is Rebecca by our very own Daphne du Maurier.
A US paperback edition of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
As Rio says:
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 unfavourably 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.
Here is the complete list of M.L. Rio's great Gothic Thrillers that will keep you up at night.
1. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
2. The Keep by Jennifer Egan
3. A Heart So White by Javier Marias; translated by Margaret Jull Costa
4. Earthlings by Sayaka Murata; translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori
5. Fledgling by Octavia E. Butler
6. Sundial by Catriona Ward
7. The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan
8. The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
9. Child of God by Cormac McCarthy
10. Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez; translated by Megan McDowell
This collection of books brings together an excellent list of internationally acclaimed authors and their writing.
With our thanks to M.L. Rio.