The term gothic was first applied to fiction in the mid-18th century, and to this day conjures brooding atmospheres, crumbling mansions, and tormented characters. Beyond the eerie tropes, it’s a genre steeped in secrets that are begging to be uncovered.
“Gothic allows us to explore a lot of anxieties,” says Cynthia Pelayo, whose novel Vanishing Daughters (Thomas & Mercer, Mar. 2025) delves into grief, mourning, and isolation. “It gives us a space where there’s this horrible thing, this horrible situation, but then it usually takes us inside a place of hope.”
The genre’s wide-ranging landscape encompasses suspense thrillers like Pelayo’s, as well as mysteries, ghost and horror stories, and even science fiction and fantasy, such as But Not Too Bold by Hache Pueyo (Tordotcom, Feb. 2025), a novella that PW’s starred review called “a delightful genre mash-up combining gothic horror with monster romance.” Authors and editors spoke with PW about what defines and unites forthcoming gothic lit.
Neighborhood watch
For many gothic writers, the setting is more than just a backdrop: it’s a character. As Hugo Award winner Arkady Martine puts it, “Gothic is a romance between a girl and an evil house.”
In Martine’s Rose/House (Tordotcom, Mar. 2025), the house in question is embedded with artificial intelligence and locked up tight until, impossibly, it discovers a corpse within its walls. It enlists the help of Det. Maritza Smith and Dr. Selene Gisil, the only person permitted inside the building, to investigate.
Martine has a background in urban planning and read up on architectural theory while writing the novella. “I’m interested in the relationships of people to place,” she says. “A gothic is, for me, deeply linked to a place that is not friendly, and is corrupt in some way.” PW’s starred review of the book, originally released in 2023 in a limited edition from Subterranean Press, said, “Martine’s soaring, crystalline prose evokes Shirley Jackson’s Hill House if designed by Frank Gehry.”
Children’s and YA author Christina Li makes her adult debut with The Manor of Dreams (Avid Reader, May 2025), in which a decaying mansion at the center of an inheritance battle between two contemporary Chinese American families exerts a sinister influence over both.
“I wanted to write a story about a house that had a tragic past,” Li says. “I based it off the origin story of Stanford University.” The author, who graduated with a master’s degree from Stanford in 2022, recalls learning in an Asian American art history class about the school’s founder, who gained wealth during the Gilded Age from exploiting Chinese laborers who worked on the transcontinental railroad.
At Kensington, editor Elizabeth Trout was drawn to the dark academia setting of A. Rae Dunlap’s debut, The Resurrectionist (Dec.), which sees a medical student in 1828 Edinburgh lured into the shadowy world of body snatching. The gothic aesthetic, Trout notes, is adaptable. “It can be Scotland in the 19th century—at a medical college, in graveyards,” she says, “but it can also be a small, outwardly idyllic Southern town with ornate, charming houses and dark secrets lurking beneath the town square.”
The latter, Trout says, describes Emily Carpenter’s Gothictown (Kensington, Mar. 2025). In this Southern gothic psychological thriller, a New York City restaurateur is enticed by pandemic-era incentives to decamp with her family to small-town Georgia, where the affordable home and generous business grant come at an increasingly troubling cost.
Shady gardens
Like forbidding houses and menacing neighborhoods, green spaces can be fertile territory for gothic fiction.
In Camilla Bruce’s At the Bottom of the Garden (Del Rey, Jan. 2025), recently orphaned sisters Violet and Lily are taken in by their aunt Clara Woods, who hopes to get her hands on the girls’ inherited fortune. Complicating her plans are the siblings’ witchy powers: Lily knows when Clara is lying, and Violet can see ghosts, including Clara’s dead husband, who’s buried in the garden. PW’s review said, “The combination of creepy folk-horror notes and tense, gory, and haunting scenes conjures plenty of scares.”
Bruce has tilled similar ground before: 2021’s In the Garden of Spite fictionalized the story of turn-of-the-20th-century serial killer Belle Gunn, who buried her dismembered victims in her Illinois yard. A garden, Bruce says, is “something that’s domestic, but also wild. It’s close to home, but there are so many factors in the garden that you cannot control.”
Nick Newman (a pseudonym for children’s book author Nicholas Bowling) expresses a similar view, calling gardening “an attempt to take control of a wild, natural thing—and that can quite easily go wrong.” Newman’s adult debut, the postapocalyptic novel The Garden (Putnam, Feb. 2025), finds two elderly sisters, Evelyn and Lily, living as they’ve always done: isolated from the world outside the walled-in garden they’ve been tending their whole lives. At the center of the grounds lies a “stately, very recognizably gothic house,” Newman says, and when the sisters discover a boy hiding there, it upends their insular world and forces them to confront things that have long been buried. “There’s usually a secret at the heart of a gothic book, and there’s a preoccupation with death. There’s a kind of intrigue and a willingness to examine it.”
Damage control
Many of the authors interviewed for this piece started their books during lockdown, including Emily Critchley, who says her writing was influenced by “a sense of anxiety” throughout the pandemic. “We often see the gothic emerge after times of crisis,” she says, highlighting the genre’s role in reflecting collective fear and personal trauma.
Much of Critchley’s The Undoing of Violet Claybourne (Sourcebooks Landmark, Mar. 2025) takes place in 1939 England, when anxiety was running high ahead of WWII. Gillian Larking visits her boarding school roommate, Violet, at her family’s estate, where she meets the other Claybourne sisters and becomes enamored of their lifestyle; then, tragedy strikes. Decades later, Gillian, a successful writer, learns that Violet has spent the past 60 years in a psychiatric hospital, and now wants Gillian to share her story. “When I think of gothic, I think of a kind of claustrophobia,” Critchley says. “I wanted to explore that mix of feeling claustrophobic in an isolated place.”
Gothic fiction can offer a forum for exploring critical issues, as in January Gilchrist’s debut, My Sister’s Shadow (Crooked Lane, Mar. 2025). The author says its themes of powerlessness and bodily autonomy were inspired by the overturning of Roe v. Wade. “The protagonist has been forced to marry,” she explains, “and that sense of not having any control over her future haunts her.”
Identical twins Adelaide and Victoria are mirror images and complete opposites: Adelaide is content living in their childhood home in the English countryside, and Victoria wants to live a glamorous life. But it’s Adelaide who finds herself married against her will to wealthy Lord Stanley and whisked off to Gilded Age New York; her sister tags along.
Gilchrist says she wanted to examine how women are able to help each other when they don’t have any power. “Women have always found ways to secretly support each other during times of oppression,” she says. Adelaide finds companionship among the city’s elite, independent-minded women; Victoria, meanwhile, seethes with a dangerous jealous rage.
Amid the pervasive sense of dread, gothic fiction gets at deeper truths. “Gothic, for me, is a genre that touches upon the darkness, both in human nature and in life in general,” says At the Bottom of the Garden author Bruce. “On a more personal level, it’s about the parts of ourselves that we don’t want to acknowledge, or the parts that we’re taught to suppress.” She and other authors are bringing those secrets to light.
Elaine Aradillas is a journalist and author based in San Antonio, Tex.
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