(Part 2) Best gothic fiction books according to redditors
We found 88 Reddit comments discussing the best gothic fiction books. We ranked the 32 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
You have quite the appropriate username. I must warn you that if you're looking for "scary", you might be disappointed. However, because you asked, these are the titles that I can wholeheartedly recommend:
Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville
Naked Lunch by William S Burroughs
Sanatorium under the sign of the Hourglass by Bruno Schulz
Oyasumi Punpun by Inio Asano (translation: "Goodnight Punpun." This one is actually a manga series. If you've never read manga before, check this one out. You won't be disappointed.)
Wieland by Charles Brockden Brown
Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (I have a bit of a personal attachment to this one for reasons that may seem obvious)
Memoirs of my Nervous Illness by Daniel Paul Schreber (This one was recommended by one of my readers, and I'm very glad I added it to the rotation)
Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
We are Legion by Dennis E. Taylor (a bit of science fiction fantasy that really makes you question the concept of identity)
The Masks of Time by Robert Silverberg
Tales of 1,001 Nights, author(s) unknown
A few other authors and stories I would recommend:
Philip K. Dick;
The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler;
Patricia Highsmith;
James Lee Burke;
Jorge Luis Borges;
William Gibson;
Dashiell Hammett;
Haruki Murakami;
Charles Baudelaire;
Ambros Bierce;
Nikolai Gogol;
Alberty Camus;
Nathaniel Hawthorne;
M R James;
H G Wells;
J G Ballard;
Thomas Ligotti;
That's about all I can think of right now, but I think it's a pretty good place to start.
This might be a bit obscure or generic, but I just recently read the book Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu - it's a really short vampire novella from 1872 that predates 'Dracula' by about 25 years and clearly influenced it in many ways.
The title character, Carmilla, is a young-looking female vampire who is very vividly described in the book if you wanted to go as her. A lot of people would probably assume you're just a female vampire, but you could probably still have some fun with it. It's worth a read even if you're not big reader because it's really short, and you can get it on Amazon for less than $4.
My favorite is Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. And yes, it's a show now, but I've been reading the series for like 20 years lol. It's just an amazing series that taught me my love of history and all types of other hobbies. I'm an archaeologist now because of that book. It was very hard to pick just one of my penny books, so here is Lair of the lion, by Christine Feehan.
For those Googling to find this book: be prepared to see a lot of weird shit.
That said: Eternal Pleasure? https://www.amazon.com/Eternal-Pleasure-Leisure-Paranormal-Romance/dp/0843959533
See if you can find a copy of Ballard's 'The Drowned World':
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16234584-the-drowned-world
https://www.amazon.com/Drowned-World-Novel-50th-Anniversary/dp/0871403625
He covers exactly this idea.
If anyone is interested in reading some historical fiction, David Morrell weaves a really nice tale around these assassination attempts. Its from the De Quincey Mystery series and is called Inspector of the Dead.
Carriger Soulless maybe - only going by supernatural and victorian here, I haven't seen Penny Dreadful
Mr. Splitfoot. Best (fiction) book I've read in years. Bellevue for nonfiction.
Moriarty: Hound of the D'Urbervilles might be what you are looking for. It's a story about Moriarty, or rather a series of stories as part of a larger narrative, with Sebastian Moran acting as his Watson. It ends with the Reichenbach Falls rather than beginning with it, as Anthony Horowitz's Moriarty does.
I recommend reading JG Ballard's "Ecocide" trilogy: The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World. Also worth checking out short stories: The Terminal Beach and The Voices Of Time come to mind.
These books, written 50 years ago, were not only among the first to explore the gross effects of ecological collapse, but we the first to concentrate on the psychological and emotional effects. Not just how we'd cope politically or what detailed strategies would evolve, but how we'd deal with it in our heads. What kind of dreams we'd have when the waking world had itself been transformed into a surreal and nightmarish landscape, how we would think when society was collapsing all around us.
He makes for disturbing reading, and he's certainly not "woke" (Horrible racism in particular abounds in The Drowned World), let alone hopeful in the conventional sense - but there's something in the way his characters accept their new lives that we can use - adopting that detachment and almost Buddhist calm has the potential to save your life.
On a personal note: Even if you don't think your life is worth saving, I guarantee that someone, somewhere, feels otherwise. Even if you haven't met them yet. We have a duty to go on living - partly to others, and partly to our future selves. You can always kill yourself later.
Here's another book in the same universe - could this be it? It would really narrow down the field if you remember any details at all about the plot.
La verko estas elektitaj rakontoj de Edgar Allen Poe, kaj la libro estas aĉetebla je amazon.
Aĉeti libron estas malfacila, kiam vi ne scias kie vi povas aĉeti ĝin! Ĉi tiu afiŝo kaj ĉi tiu filmeto estas merkatado. La plej simpla merkatado estas diri, kio la afero estas.