A long time ago, I asked what exactly made Gothic horror Gothic. There was a lot of genre specificity among literary purists, but the bottomline is this: it’s the house and the ancestral owners. The house and its family make people’s sanity come apart and makes them stop trusting their own senses… and typically the protagonists are young, British, middle-class women—but not always—who are new to the house in one way or another. Like, through a surprise inheritance, a new position as governess, or, in the case of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, she marries into it.
The “marrying into it” is the scariest way to enter the house and family, in my opinion, because you can’t really get out of it. You can quit a job, you can sell a house, but you usually can’t undo a bonded vow in front of God and state.
These four books are modern gothic mysteries for fans of Rebecca.
It’s not until after Julia Pritzker loses her adoptive parents and her husband gets murdered that she realizes she should have seen it all coming: her horoscope told her it would happen. But when she receives a letter informing her that she inherited a Tuscan villa and vineyard from her bio, family, her spiral stops. She goes to Tuscany. But when she gets there, she finds her reclusive benefactor wracked with paranoid delusions of grandeur… and an obsession with astrology.
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When Ronnie Mitchell shows up to the rundown cliffside mansion she bought sight unseen with her inheritance, she’s ready to remodel. She doesn’t realize that she’s bought the home of Venita Rost, silent film star with a bloodsoaked history, whose spirit still wreaks havoc on anyone inside.
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Trade Paperback
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It’s postwar England, and Jane Shoringfield has decided that a marriage of convenience is her best path forward into independence and a meaningful work life. Augustine Lawrence is her first choice, and the dashing doctor agrees to her proposal with the condition that she never visit his crumbling family manor. On their wedding night, though, an accident strands her at that very manor, where she finds Augustine rendered into a terrified, paranoid man who is convinced something there haunts him. Jane realizes that in her hasty marriage, she may have bound herself to more than she bargained for.
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Hardcover
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Noemí Taboada is a glamorous debutante. Hardly the shape one might want a rescuer to take. And yet, when she gets a letter from her newlywed cousin begging her to save her from a mysterious doom, Noemí heads to High Place, the distant house in the Mexican countryside earned long ago with the wealth from a mining empire. Her cousin-in-law is menacing, and the ancient patriarch is intimidating, not to mention the house itself, which soon invades Noemí’s dreams. The youngest son, shy and gentle, may be able to help her, but he may also be obscuring the secrets of his family’s dark past.
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Trade Paperback
This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around June 15, 2021. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.
The novel begins in Monte Carlo, where our heroine is swept off her feet by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter and his sudden proposal of marriage. Orphaned and working as a lady’s maid, she can barely believe her luck. It is only when they arrive at his massive country estate that she realizes how large a shadow his late wife will cast over their lives–presenting her with a lingering evil that threatens to destroy their marriage from beyond the grave.
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$19.99
Format
Trade Paperback
This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around September 5, 2023. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.
