The best gothic novels that explore different types of grief

This YA gothic follows Jade, a Vietnamese American girl spending the summer in Vietnam, aiding her father in restoring his haunted French colonial house.

This book explores many kinds of grief including estranged relationships with family members. But the one that grabbed me the most was the vulnerable exploration of the grief of colonization, and in connection the grief of diaspora.

Throughout, Jade is grieving the distance she feels to Vietnam and her family history as a result of being raised in America and the way colonization impacted Vietnam, and how deeply that shapes how she interacts not only with the country but with herself and her identity.

The book also looks at how the grief of colonization grows deep roots into the culture of Vietnam, its landscape, and people, and how this grief is passed down for generations.

This modern gothic follows Ivy Radcliffe as she suddenly inherits an estate house in England, during the tail end of World War I.

Throughout this story grief is explored very intimately through Ivy mourning the loss of her brother to the war, but also the way that the communal grief of the war affects individuals and shapes English society and how it functions.

Without giving away too many spoilers, memory places a huge, multilayered role in the story, and of course we see the way that grief and memory are connected, both through the way Ivy remembers her lost brother and characters mourning the way life once was before the war and, ultimately, will never be again.

Another story that explores the connection between grief and memory is this YA gothic mystery.

The story is set at a remote private school, following Felicity, who has returned to Dalloway School after taking time off following the mysterious death of her girlfriend. The story takes readers through Felicity’s grief of losing her partner, interwoven with the mystery of how she died.

Readers see this grief and memory through Felicity’s eyes, but as the mystery grows, readers will be left to question how much of the grieving memories we see are authentic. The school itself is rich with a dark history of death and witchcraft, and each character responds to this history differently – sometimes curiously, sometimes concerningly reveling in centuries-old grief.

This gothic-esque collection of short stories explores so many different forms of grief.

It mainly focuses on tales of women and the kinds of grief that often come from living and moving through the world as women. There is a tale of a young woman whose agency of her own body is breached by her husband removing her mysterious neck ribbon, exploring grief at a loss of trust in a relationship as well as loss of agency.

A woman left alone and isolated in the wake of a deadly global virus, left to grieve the way the world once was. Many stories that explore the oppressive, many-faced grief of the smothering patriarchy, from women who whittle down their bodies to nothing in the pursuit of beauty, to those who learn they are hardly real beyond the male gaze.

This book explores grief tied together with a mysterious death. Holly received ominous, out-of-character messages from her brother before he suddenly took his own life, leaving her to try to figure out the truth of his violent death while working through her own grief.

She finds herself moving in with Dane’s girlfriend, Maura, in her gothic, haunting townhouse, hoping to get clues and to see her own grief reflected in the other woman’s. And while this grief does bring them together, the shallowness and violence of Maura’s mourning makes it clear that she knows more about Dane’s death than she’s sharing.

This is a story of how grief can become the haunted thing that lurks in gothic halls, and the extremes that it can drive people to, completely upending one’s world.