What horror Gothic books do you recommend?

[Desdemona]

Hi, thank you for the info Desdemona. I'll look up those titles. I'm interested in both horror Gothic and romance Gothic...and hopefully a bit of a blend of both.

You're welcome! I just finished another book that I'd like to add to this thread. It really disturbed me.

The book is called Angelica by Arthur Phillips. It has been compared to The Turn of the Screw and I can definitely see the similarities. You don't really know what's going on and who's actually insane, if anyone. The book takes place during the Victorian era and the style of writing is a bit Victorian too. Some readers think this is too slow, but it worked for me.

Here's a snippet from a Washington Post review by Elizabeth Hand.....

In its creepy 19th-century setting and balanced interplay between supernatural and psychological menace, Angelica at first seems as though it's a trope on Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw," a slightly hoary choice for a writer of Phillips's originality and cunning. The scene is an upper-middle-class home in 1880s London. An emotionally fragile, sexually timid woman named Constance nearly died giving birth to Angelica and has since suffered three miscarriages. The doctor who attends the latest (after three years of sexual abstinence) makes it clear that Constance will destroy not just herself but her loved ones if she continues to succumb to her "lascivious and intemperate will."

.....Phillips tips his hat to "The Turn of the Screw," but the claustrophobic nature of Constance's horrific breakdown, its roots in feminine sexual ignorance and the smugly monstrous oppression inflicted by the era's masculine medical authorities evoke a lesser-known literary work, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," first published in 1891 and now considered a masterpiece of psychological horror.