| With its violent scenes and blood curdling screams, horror is not my jam. But I love classic gothic novels for their eerie malevolence and gloomy landscapes. So on this Allhallows Eve, I’ve got two classics and one contemporary gothic to read by candlelight. One of my all-time favorite novels absolutely must top this list! “Rebecca” by Daphne du Maurier is the exemplar of great gothic fiction. Remember the opening sentence? “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” There’s such nostalgia and melancholy in those words as our narrator, unnamed through the novel, reveals the story of her marriage to Max de Winter and her introduction to the memory of his dazzling late wife, Rebecca. Du Maurier is said to have declared the novel “a bit gloomy” when she sent it to her publisher in 1937. My second classic gothic must-read is “Fledgling” by Octavia Butler, better known for her science fiction. It is Butler’s last book before she died. She weaves gothic overtones into a vampire story and it somehow all works. Shori is a 53-year-old Black vampire who appears to the human world in the form of a child. She’s lonely and unsettled, and the twist is that although she needs human blood to survive, when she bites a human, sometimes they're the ones made stronger instead of her. Butler thought of the novel as lighter fiction than she was accustomed to writing but the specter of this adult vampire in a child’s body will haunt you long after you’ve turned the last page. My contemporary gothic is “Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Set in a remote mountain town in Mexico in the 1950s, Noemi Taboada is lured to the crumbling mansion where her cousin believes her new husband is trying to poison her. There’s a “Rebecca” sensibility to the novel from this point on; the cousin is fragile and easily intimidated. The house is strange, encompassed by mist with “broken shingles” and “dirty bay windows.” And the building dread never stops.
— Kerri Miller | MPR News | 