The best, most haunting books from beyond the grave

This book by Ann Radcliffe was published in 1794, and I read it in the spring of 2020 (yeah, we all remember). It was a welcome respite from my book club books as I sat on my lawn chair accompanying the main character, Emily Saint-Aubert, as she journeyed through the Languedoc. It was a long and arduous journey with long and arduous descriptions, and while I am averse to these, the narrative and language fascinated me. The story pulled me into a moonlit graveyard abutting an ancient convent, then into the languid beauty of 16th-century Venice, the gloomy castle Udolpho, and Signor Montoni's villainous schemes.

This book is the epitome of classic Gothic fiction, a genre of literature that started with Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto. But Udolpho sets the bar even higher with its narrative's light and darkness and winding twists. 

I love the story, the setting, the characters, and its ghostly gloom, even if Emily faints every other paragraph. Despite its length, I could not put it down and enjoyed every word.

Published in 1834, this one amplifies Ann Radcliffe's Gothic-ness to eleven. I loved the story because it's fun, wild, gloomy, rogue, and riveting, like a gripping telenovela. 

The plot is all about inheritance, family drama, illegitimate sons, and revenge. It features villains, gypsies, apparitions, corpses, evil priests, murders, curses, and the famous highwayman Dick Turpin and his mare Black Bess. It recounts Turpin's midnight ride through the English countryside as he flees capture, and like it, the entire novel is a wild ride. 

Though a bit antiquated and with "songs" aplenty—which Ainsworth himself lamented had been lost in British literature and tried to resurrect—its gloomy and despairing story captivated me. The book begins at night inside a mausoleum, where the sexton Peter Bradley tells his grandson Luke his family history.

Right off the bat, we have a desecration and a rotting hand; how much more Gothic can this story be?

About twenty years ago, I read the opening lines of this book (published in 1955) in the evening and finished the entire book in one sitting. This time, I read it in two sittings and fell in love with it again. 

I love how this short novel straddles several genres—literary fiction, magic realism, surrealist fiction, and Gothic fiction—in its own way. I always enjoy a precise and simple style, at which Juan Rulfo excels. Yet, the narrative and the plot are so complex that it's hard to believe so much fits into one hundred pages. 

This book has all the elements of Gothic fiction in the Mexican style. The gloom and eeriness are palpable in the oppressive heat of the wasteland that is the fictional town of Comala, and only Rulfo could marry such contradictions in one short novel. 

In this book, Shirley Jackson states that some places are evil for no reason and that some people are drawn to them and feel at home in them. Hill House is evil; it's built without straight angles, which leaves one feeling disoriented. It claims lives and urges people not to leave. 

I love how the book weaves psychological abuse into its plot and how one feels inside Hill House: disoriented, gaslit, and manipulated. The central theme of toxic relationships and co-dependency surprised me. 

I also enjoy its simple style, which is almost childlike yet so immersive that it packs a punch, like Hill House.

Remember when schools handed out a catalog of books for you to order? I do. I chose this book when I was about eleven years old, and while even then I was already reading Caroline B. Cooney and Richie Tankersley Cusick, this book took my childhood love of ghost stories and nudged it into my adolescence and adulthood. 

Twin houses, the Civil War and broken families are the backdrop to the principal theme of young and forbidden love across the ages. Jealousy, revenge and a love which is not quite right live within the walls of these houses. Here, the places are not born evil; they are made evil by common human emotions allowed to fester and never laid to rest. 

I have read it at least five times and love it still. Barbara Michaels is one of my favorite Gothic writers, and this book holds a vast place in my Gothic and ghostly heart.