The scariest must-read Gothic classics
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- Опубліковано 30 жов 2018
- Happy Halloween! I invited my friend Alice, a massive Gothic fiction fan and ex-Penguin colleague, to come chat about Gothic classics that are great to start with. What's your favourite spooky Gothic read?
► More gothic and dark literature videos:
My gothic autumn to-read list • My (frankly excessive)...
Reading Dracula for the first time • I finally read Dracula...
Dark reads for sweltering days • Dark reads for swelter...
Must-read gothic classics: • The scariest must-read...
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The Turn of the Screw
GoodReads: / 2437237.the_turn_of_th...
Frankenstein
GoodReads: / frankenstein
The Picture of Dorian Gray
GoodReads: / the-picture-of-dorian-...
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
GoodReads: / we-have-always-lived-i...
The Haunting of Hill House
GoodReads: / the-haunting-of-hill-h...
Dracula
GoodReads: / 559421.dracula
The Woman in Black
GoodReads: / 2029379.the_woman_in_b...
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🎃We'd love to hear about your gothic faves! I might do YA + modern lit with gothic vibes video in the future, if that sounds like something you'd like to see.
P.s. Lots of these gothic classics are free to download over on Project Gutenberg. Happy reading! 👻
Petition for Alice to get her own channel!
Yes!! I need her book recs
Another awesome classic is Phantom of the Opera. My daughter gave me that and it was wonderful.
Linda Ciaravino thanks for suggestion i added it on my reading list
A great gothic vampire novel is Sheridan Le Fanus' "Carmilla". Beautifully written great plot.
I really want to write like Shirley Jackson - she’s amazing!
Alice disappointed me so much when she couldn’t remember that M. R. James wrote The Turn of the Screw. That’s when I immediately realized I was also confusing Henry James with M. R. James and severely disappointed myself! 🙃
Gothic fiction is Exactly where I live. Definitely pick up Dracula, Sanne! It was so much more gripping than I expected an epistolary book to be, and it's surprisingly thrilling/sexy for such an old book
Alice is cute af!
I did finally read The Haunting of Hill House before Halloween. I will recommend to both of you, The Beetle by Richard Marsh. I read this back senior year of college and I was so freaked out by the book I went to class, yelled about it, a lot, and became my professor’s favorite disaster student.
I love Frankenstein and Edgar Allen Poe's short stories!
Oooooh, yes, Edgar Allen Poe for sure!
You need to read Dracula. It's not only my favorite gothic novel but its my overall favorite book. I love that it's told in letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles so the story is told from various points of view and Professor Van Helsing is my favorite character.
Completely agree that it's a fantastic book, @Alaina Kester. Am currently reading the "sequel" by Bram Stoker's great grand-nephew...have you read it? Would love to hear your thoughts on it.
Include Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë !! They're one of the earliest gothic novels!! 😁
I love all these recs so much
I have read Dracula and Frankenstein and loved them both! Interesting that I like this genre as well, but you couldn’t pay me enough to go see a horror movie.
I read a LOT of Victorian gothic (classic and neo Victorian) and some of my favorite neo Victorian gothic authors are Essie Fox (Elijah's Mermaid, The Somnambulist, and The Goddess and the Thief) and Sarah Waters (Affinity, Fingersmith, Tipping the Velvet). Sleep, Pale Sister by Joanne Harris is also an excellent book! Would love to see a video on modern or neo Victorian gothic!
So many good books mentioned here! I would add in Rebecca and My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier. I think I may pick up one or more of your suggestions for October. :)
aaaaahh I LOVE this genre! lovely video ^^
I like your genre choice , discussion and vibes 😊👍!
I LOVE that cover of The Turn of the Screw! It's so creepy for some reason even though it's just a normal looking child face. Haha
omg i had an exam about gothic novel and Frankenstein today for my english literature class haha
I adored Frankenstein and the picture of Dorian Gray 💕
Happy Halloween 🎃
There's a really lovely small edition of Frankenstein available in the US right now through Harper Perennial (as well as, it looks like, Wuthering Heights and Dorian Gray). The covers are really stark and printed on what looks like unbleached paper, with a hand-stamped feel.
I remember reading the woman in black! It was hella creepy
Ooh, I love this! More gothic lit chats, please! My undergrad was in English lit and my capstone course focused on gothic lit. My favorites were The Monk by Matthew Lewis and Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg. Highly recommend.
Also, honorable mention to Northanger Abbey for being a great gothic parody.
Read this year Frakenstein and although I knew what to expect didn't like at all the reaction from Victor, thought it was so quick that made the character so unbelievable to me, but perhaps that was the point.
Want to read Dr Jekyll this year.
UA-cam just recommended your video and I'm in love 😍 you should also try Gothikana. I just finished reading it and I think you'll love it!
I took a horror lit class when I was working on my English degree. We read a lot of the classics (Frankenstein, Dracula, Picture of Dorian Gray, Poe, etc) and more modern horror lit (Anne Rice, Stephen King). After growing up reading Fear Street from RL Stine and loving all things horror genre in lit and movies, that class was up my alley. I absolutely loved it as it opened me up to books that I had never read before (Shirley Jackson-how had I ever missed her). Thank you for this! 😊
I think my 2 favs are The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (cannot wait to watch the show on Netflix) and Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.
goosbumps and stephen king's carrie were the 1st ones i was introduced to
We have always lived in the castle is my favouriteeeee book ever!!
Me and my fiancé are in love with gothic and cosmic horror and fiction; we have dreams of building our own little library, so this was so interesting and helpful. Thank you so much
i have read most of these because i am gothic fiction trash - and obviously i have already added all the ones i haven't read yet to my goodreads list. great video!!
Omg Frankenstein!! This was not what I was expecting but I absolutely loved it! I am looking forward to reading some of these
I read Edgar Allan Poe's 'Selected Tales' a couple of years ago and found it very, very spooky!
Happy Halloween! 🎃🦇
Most stuff by HP Lovecraft is INSANELY gothic. His prose is incredible and while many of his stories are pure horror, he is a master of the gothic as well. Highly recommend the short story “The Rats in the Walls.” I didn’t sleep for two days!
I have read We Have Always Lived in the Castle and loved it! I read The Woman in Black last year and was pretty disappointed, I didn't think it was scary at all x) I have The Picture of Dorian Gray and Frankenstein that I've been meaning to get to! Also, I would like to pick up Dracula in the future and I'm currently reading Rebecca, which I feel has a very gothic feel to it as well :)
Gothic is honestly one of my FAVOURITE genres besides Fantasy. Most recently I read the Hunchback of Notre Dame in a Gothic Book Club and I honestly thought I'd never read Hunchback of Notre Dame. My #1 favourite book is Jane Eyre, and depending on how you look at it Jane Eyre is a bit of a gothic. Then there is Dracula, my second favourite book and I loved it and I literally cried at the end.
I am a very slow reader so I haven't read as much as I would like to have, but the rest of this comment is mainly for my own benefit, haha!
From mentioned in this video:
Read: Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights (REALLY didn't enjoy this one), The Lottery (we studied it in 9th grade, one of my FAVOURITES), Dracula (SO GOOD
I loveee spooky books, but I become a chicken when it comes to watching the movies so I totally get Alice! However, I'm trying to get into spooky movies, but if I watch them I do it by day OR with someone else, so I won't freak out haha.
Frankenstein is my favourite gothic fiction by far. Great choices...wrote them down.
Pet Cemetary scared the daylights out of me...and I read it during the day!!!!!
Apparently the movie is coming out soon. EEk!!!!
I loved this! Thanks so much for the recs!
Also currently reading Dorian Gray!
This video was brilliant! Thank you for all these recommandations!
I'd love to see Alice visit the channel again, there are plenty more Gothic books to talk about! Now I'm wondering if there's a cross over of Gothic and Space books...
Has she seen the Woman in Black yet, what was her reaction if so?
+Laura Simmons haha I’ll ask her :) And will definitely invite her back for more gothic chat.
I love The Woman in Black - it was quite funny to read some of the comments on Amazon's review section for the film tie in edition of the book, there were a lot of unhappy people who found the book to be very different from the film they saw! I also love The Man in the Picture by Susan Hill too, as a good gothic read.
+GreenBitterfly Yeah a film tie in for that one doesn’t make a lot of sense... and for the Haunting of Hill House too!
Read M. R James! Incredibly frightening and chilling stories. Very easy to read and short. Especially "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to you, my lad", "A warning to the curious" and "casting the runes"... Also some great stories don't necessarily have actual ghosts or vampires but are incredibly suspenseful like Rebecca, Jane Eyre, The Essex Serpent and The Hound of the Baskervilles... I have just read a fantastic historical /gothic novel called A Skinful of Shadows by Frances Hardinge 💀👻😘
I read everything on your list🖤
Oh and video suggestion! What IS the difference between Gothic and Horror. I had to be explained this in university because I couldn't quite get the differences at first.
I've read a lot of classics, but I've never read Frankenstein! I'll have to pick it up sometime soon. :) We Have Always Lived in the Castle sounds interesting to me as well. I had a university class where we read a lot of very different books that all had a theme of "The Uncanny," and one of the books we read was Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, but that is the only book of hers that I have read.
Just out of interest do you remember any one of the other books you read for that 'uncanny' class? (those kind of stories are really interesting)
Great list, thank you. I would nominate Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu. That would be right on for this list, I think...
I finished reading Dracula during my college's High Table Dinners several years ago...loved it!
always wanted to explore the original story and was pleasantly surprised how interesting and...moralising (probably the wrong word?) it is. but i didn't find it scary at all.
Haha Sanne, ik heb letterlijk ook een hekel aan Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Ik snap de hype totaal niet... Wuthering Heights daarentegen is echt een van de beste boeken die ik ooit gelezen heb! :D Ik heb pas geleden een essay geschreven over hoe het monster (Frankenstein) en Heathcliff (WH) eigenlijk een soort van slachtoffers zijn van mentale mishandeling.
The Monk by Matthew Lewis is pretty good!
I just finished this book yesterday, incidentally. Loved the ghostly and supernatural elements of it!
I love gothic fiction with all my heart 💚 Alice, have you read Carmilla? By J Sheridan Le Fanu. It's oh so good, and it was the inspiration for Dracula.
ive been reading stephen king, james patterson, iris johanson, dean koontz, and stuff like that since i was younger but haven't been reading as much anymore. any recommendations?
You should do a vampire classics video. There are so many. Carmilla, Wake Not the Dead, The Dead in Love/The Deathly Lover, The Vampyre etc. All were good. I love how the vampires are used as a representative of societal prejudices and turmoil.
Gothic books are perfect for a scared kitten like me. I have never watched a full horror movie in my life. I find most thrillers already too much 😅😅😅
Okay but what is that cursed roller coaster series ? I need to know lol
I really like Michael McDowell.
where did you buy dracula cause i wanna read it
You should be able to get it anywhere!
All short stories by Edgar Allen Poe!!
I know you've done a similar video before but could you do a joint video together talling about your experience working for penguin and tips for graduates hoping to get into the industry. A spill the T video.😂 Maybe even a work-related Q&A would be helpful.
I'm reading The Castle of Otranto at the moment, which is the OG Gothic novel, and It. Is. Wild. 😅
narflet you couldn’t pay me to read that again. The run-on sentences killed me. Hahah.
I'm listening to the audiobook version narrated by Tony Jay and it's worth it just for his voice. Very appropriate. But the tone is super wtf. Paragraphs of dialogue and then loads of action in two sentences. 🤷🏻♀️ I'm mostly finding it hilarious though.
narflet yeah, it’s a wild ride!
Can alice get on youtube ASAP
Though I used to LOVE halloween, I won't be celebrating it anymore , having recently looked into it. But these are great recommendations. Frankenstein is a wonderful book and Dracula is amazing
Just curious what you discovered that caused you to no longer celebrate?
@@spinstercatlady Victims of ritual abuse have said halloween is the worst day of the year for sacrificial murders. I'd recommend looking into victim Fiona Barnett especially her documentary. Many victims of ritual abuse have recently come forward, and have expressed that halloween is a terrible time of year. I can find specific links if you are interested but its heavy stuff to digest!
It’s unfortunate what it has become. However, I highly suggest doing some research on where Halloween actually originates from. It does NOT have this negative connotation.
Uncle Silas
Hoi!
Wouldn't recommend The Turn of the Screw if you've never read gothic classics before. James writing style is very very slow and wordy. His style is not my cup of tea but I see why others love him. I've read a lot of gothic fiction and I wouldn't recommend starting with James.
I agree. I read a LOT of Victorian gothic (new and classic) and I find The Turn of the Screw rather slow and rambling.
@@spinstercatlady Yes. He is definitely one of those authors that like to use 5 words where one would suffice. That's just his style. It is definitely not what you should begin with! I also think the whole story could have been about 50 pages. He really drags it out and there is at least 50 pages in the middle where nothing happens, which felt unnecessary.
I hated The Turn of the Screw...found it full of unnecessary words and it just draaaaged! Didn’t find it scary either!
I hate horror but I watched the netflix series of The Haunting of Hill House and it was worth it!!!
Haha I can't imagine people who hate horror being able to make it through! 😱
Sanne, the word you're looking for is third-person narrator.... 🤦