#5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook and you can learn more about it here. It occurs every Monday when we post about 5 books on our TBR.
With another perfect-for-Blogtober prompt, it’s time for this week’s #5OnMyTBVR! I love Gothics, but I haven’t read nearly enough, and I’m very glad to have these great sounding books on my TBR. Maybe I’ll have to try and read some of them this month.
Blogtober: Day 1 / Day 2 / Day 3 / Day 4 / Day 5 / Day 6 / Day 7 / Day 8
#5OnMyTBR October 9th: Gothic
Shakespearean Gothic by Christy Desmet, Anne Williams
Format: Hardback
Genre: Non-Fiction – Literary Criticism
Published: September 27th, 2009
As evidenced by the vampires, werewolves, and other frights overrunning the best-seller lists, the Gothic remains immensely popular. This collection of essays traces the roots of the Gothic to an unexpected source: eighteenth-century interpretations of Shakespeare. Through close attention to literary, cultural, and historical detail, the contributors demonstrate that even as Shakespeare was being established as the supreme British writer, he was also being cited as justification for early Gothic writers’ abandonment of literary decorum and their interest in the supernatural.
My Brother’s Keeper by Tim Powers
Format: ebook
Genre: Horror – Historical
Published: September 5th, 2023
This is a ghost story. It is a story about werewolves, and things that go bump in the night. It is a story of an ill-fated land, the pathless moors of Northern England so well chronicled in Wuthering Heights . And it is the story of a real family whose destiny it is to deal with this darkly glamorous and dangerous world.
When young Emily Brontë helps a wounded man she finds at the foot of an ancient pagan shrine in the remote Yorkshire moors, her life becomes contentiously entwined with his. He is Alcuin Curzon, embittered member of a sect working to eradicate the resurgent plague of lycanthropy in Europe and northern England.
But Emily’s father, curate of the Haworth village church, is responsible for having unwittingly brought a demonic werewolf god to Yorkshire forty years ago—and it is taking possession of Emily’s beloved but foolish and dissolute brother. Curzon must regard Emily’s family as a dire threat.
In spite of being at deadly odds, Emily and Curzon find themselves thrown together in fighting werewolves, confronting pagan gods, even saving each other from the lures of moorland demons. And in a final battle that sweeps from the haunted village of Haworth to a monstrous shrine far out on the moors, the two of them must be reluctant allies against an ancient power that seems likely to take their souls as well as their lives.
Still She Wished for Company by Margaret Irwin
Format: ebook
Genre: Horror – Historical
Published: January 1st, 1924
Time is. Time was. Time will be.
Jan leads a rather content, if dull life. She works in an office, sees a suitable man, but her life is lacking the excitement her spirited nature craves.
Juliana too leads a rather content, if dull life. She grows up at Chidleigh, writes in her journal, but she yearns for something more than a suitable marriage for her life.
Though separated by centuries, Jan and Juliana pass through each other’s orbits from time to time. But it’s not until tragedy strikes Juliana’s family that their lives truly begin to intertwine…
In her enchanting first novel, Margaret Irwin weaves a hauntingly gothic tale full of magic, desire, and fate.
On Good Authority by Briana Una McGuckin
Format: ebook
Genre: Romance – Suspense
Published: October 11th, 2022
Repressed desires, irresistible obsessions, and perception-twisting games.
When lady’s maid Marian Osley and footman Valentine Hobbs assume their positions at the cliff-top estate of Valor Rise, they already share a history. Raised together as paupers in a London workhouse, they escaped through games of imaginary crimes and sublime punishment. Now they’ve been unexpectedly reunited—in subservience to the brooding Wythe Bornholdt and his frail wife, Diana. A master and mistress with their own dark secrets.
In private, Marian and Valentine return to their playful and addictive games—now tinged with BDSM. But when lecherous Wythe sees something he desires in Marian, he turns the pair’s diversions violently against them.
The line between servitude and bondage is drawn, and the dynamics of dominance and submission will shift in this sensually charged novel of Gothic suspense.
The Hollow Kind by Andy Davidson
Format: ebook
Genre: Horror – Fantasy
Published: October 11th, 2022
Andy Davidson’s epic horror novel about the spectacular decline of the Redfern family, haunted by an ancient evil.
Nellie Gardner is looking for a way out of an abusive marriage when she learns that her long-lost grandfather, August Redfern, has willed her his turpentine estate. She throws everything she can think of in a bag and flees to Georgia with her eleven-year-old son, Max, in tow.
It turns out that the estate is a decrepit farmhouse on a thousand acres of old pine forest, but Nellie is thrilled about the chance for a fresh start for her and Max, and a chance for the happy home she never had. So it takes her a while to notice the strange scratching in the walls, the faint whispering at night, how the forest is eerily quiet. But Max sees what his mother can’t: They’re no safer here than they had been in South Carolina. In fact, things might even be worse. There’s something wrong with Redfern Hill. Something lurks beneath the soil, ancient and hungry, with the power to corrupt hearts and destroy souls. It is the true legacy of Redfern Hill: a kingdom of grief and death, to which Nellie’s own blood has granted her the key.
From the author of The Boatman’s Daughter, The Hollow Kind is a jaw-dropping novel about legacy and the horrors that hide in the dark corners of family history. Andy Davidson’s gorgeous, Gothic fable tracing the spectacular fall of the Redfern family will haunt you long after you turn the final page.
As always, if you’ve read any of these or have any Gothic fiction on your TBR you’re excited about, I’d love to hear from you!
Unwrapping Words 