Tag: Gothic Fiction

Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

In the Woods They Wait: An eerie Southern Gothic that saves its scariest tricks for too late

Mandy Webster

There’s something in the woods, and it has been waiting for someone to notice. Carrie Lee South’s In the Woods They Wait is an atmospheric Southern Gothic horror novel about grief, guilt, missing children, and an ancient presence lurking in the woods. The slow-burn mystery kept me reading, but the rushed final act and underwhelming reveal kept the novel from reaching its full potential.

Get your copy of In the Woods they Wait today!

In Carrie Lee South’s In the Woods They Wait, the woods surrounding Devil’s Den State Park are more than a backdrop. They are a presence—ancient, watchful, and seemingly hungry. Fifteen years after Audrey Figg’s younger brother, Benny, disappeared from the park, she has made a life for herself among the very trees that swallowed him. As a park ranger with expertise in wilderness search and rescue, Audrey has turned her grief into a vocation, spending her days protecting hikers and searching the backcountry for the person she has never stopped hoping to find. When a young girl named Ivy disappears from the same woods, Audrey sees too many similarities to Benny’s disappearance to believe it is a coincidence.

Continue reading “In the Woods They Wait: An eerie Southern Gothic that saves its scariest tricks for too late” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

We Already Dug the Grave by Emma C. Wells: A kitschy Southern gothic thriller

Mandy Webster

I wanted to love We Already Dug the Grave. After all, I absolutely adored Emma C. Wells’ debut novel, This Girl’s a Killer, so when I saw that Wells had another book coming out, it was an automatic must-read for me. Unfortunately, while We Already Dug the Grave has plenty of the ingredients I loved in her debut, it never quite captures the same sharp wit or confidence.

The cover of the novel We Already Dug the Grave by Emma C. Wells
Get your copy of We Already Dug the Grave today!

We Already Dug the Grave follows estranged sisters Milly and Francis, who have spent years apart after something terrible happened in a Tennessee meadow. Milly has always been the odd one, with an ability to divine the future through tea leaves. But lately, the tea leaves have gone silent, which might seem like a blessing considering how bleak Milly’s life has become.

Continue reading “We Already Dug the Grave by Emma C. Wells: A kitschy Southern gothic thriller” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Brides by Charlotte Cross: A haunting feminist reimagining of Dracula’s forgotten women

Mandy Webster

The women history remembers as Dracula’s brides have always been little more than shadows lurking at the edges of someone else’s story. In The Brides, Charlotte Cross drags them into the light and gives them voices of their own, crafting a Gothic horror novel that is as interested in the dangers facing women as it is in the dangers lurking within Castle Dracula itself.

Get your copy of The Brides today!
listen to this book review on youtube

Releasing July 7, 2026, The Brides is a feminist Gothic horror novel that reimagines the origins of Dracula’s infamous brides through the perspectives of the women who fell under his influence—and the one who escaped.

Continue reading “The Brides by Charlotte Cross: A haunting feminist reimagining of Dracula’s forgotten women” →
Find Your Next Read

8 novels about billionaires, secret societies, and the ultra-rich behaving badly

Mandy Webster

The past few years have produced a surge of novels obsessed with the billionaire class, elite inner circles, and the terrifying ways extreme wealth reshapes morality. These books explore secret societies, inherited influence, cult-like organizations, and wealthy people so insulated from ordinary life that empathy itself begins to erode. Some focus on billionaires chasing immortality. Others examine the emptiness that comes from having unlimited access to pleasure, luxury, and power. Together, they tap into a growing cultural anxiety about what happens when the ultra-rich begin viewing the rest of society as something to manipulate, consume, or control.

If you love dark academia, literary thrillers, cult fiction, and stories about elite power structures operating behind closed doors, these recent novels belong on your reading list.

Salomé by Leslie Baird

Salomé explores what happens when the billionaire class becomes so detached from ordinary humanity that other people begin to look disposable. At the center of the novel is a secretive global network of ultra-wealthy elites connected by technology, power, and a shared obsession with transcending death itself.

These billionaires aren’t satisfied with controlling industries or governments—they want immortality so they may maintain that control forever, even if it means inhabiting the bodies of other people to achieve it. The novel turns extreme wealth into something genuinely monstrous, examining how unchecked privilege erodes empathy until human beings become little more than interchangeable commodities to be used, consumed, and discarded. Read now!

Continue reading “8 novels about billionaires, secret societies, and the ultra-rich behaving badly” →
Author Interview

Interview: Leslie Baird on Salomé, literary suspense, and the allure of charisma

Mandy Webster

Leslie Baird’s debut novel Salomé is a hypnotic blend of literary suspense, psychological intrigue, and gothic atmosphere, following a young American woman who becomes entangled in the orbit of a charismatic French family and the enigmatic woman at its center. When I reviewed the novel, I was struck by its dreamlike sense of place, its exploration of longing and vulnerability, and its willingness to venture into stranger, more unsettling territory than readers might expect. In this interview, Baird discusses the cult-like power of charisma, the French landscapes that inspired the novel, the emotional foundations beneath its mystery, and why she is drawn to stories that take risks and embrace the unexpected.

Author Leslie Baird discusses the inspirations behind her debut novel Salomé, including cult charisma, the allure of France, and her fascination with the ways people become vulnerable to mystery and belonging.

Q: Courtney is drawn into Salomé’s world almost immediately. Were you interested in exploring why intelligent, perceptive people can still be captivated by charisma and mystery?
A: I’m fascinated by cults. Not only organized groups, but how even something as ubiquitous as marketing copy can leak over into cultiness. (Shout out to Cultish: the Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell.) How quick we are to align with something, as humans seeking a safe group. And there are so many levels to this, which is fun to tease out in writing. Courtney may be able to scoff at a person who subscribes to Marco’s vitamin MLM subscription, but wasn’t she just as naive when a pretty French woman paid attention to her?

Continue reading “Interview: Leslie Baird on Salomé, literary suspense, and the allure of charisma” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Our Sister’s Keeper by Jasmine Holmes is a haunting Southern Gothic that demands to be felt

Mandy Webster

Some horror novels rely on monsters lurking in the shadows. Others understand that the most terrifying things are the systems people willingly protect. Our Sister’s Keeper by Jasmine Holmes, releasing June 9, 2026, is a Southern Gothic horror novel that understands this completely. Beneath its ghostly atmosphere and supernatural elements lies a brutal examination of generational trauma, misogyny, power, and the impossible expectations placed upon women to absorb suffering quietly so that everyone else can remain comfortable.

Get your copy of Our Sister’s Keeper today!
Listen to this book review on youtube

Recently, I’ve seen discussions online asking readers to name books they’ve loved that were written by authors of color. Inevitably, there are always people who respond with things like, “I don’t pay attention to the race of the authors I read,” as though being “colorblind” is somehow the ideal approach to literature. But stories like Our Sister’s Keeper are exactly why intentionally seeking out voices different from our own matters. This is a novel that forces readers to confront lived experiences they may never have otherwise considered. It explores generational trauma, gendered expectations, institutional abuse, and the long shadow of racism in ways that feel both deeply personal and horrifyingly systemic. It’s impossible to walk away from this novel unchanged if you are willing to truly engage with what it is saying.

Continue reading “Our Sister’s Keeper by Jasmine Holmes is a haunting Southern Gothic that demands to be felt” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller: A haunting story about the ache to belong

Mandy Webster

Some hungers have nothing to do with food. Some thirsts cannot be quenched. In Hunger and Thirst, Claire Fuller builds a quietly unsettling novel about loneliness, guilt, and the dangerous places people wander when they want love badly enough.

Get your copy of Hunger and Thirst today!

Claire Fuller has long excelled at writing stories that feel atmospheric without sacrificing emotional complexity. Readers familiar with Our Endless Numbered Days (one of my all-time favorites!), Swimming Lessons, or Bitter Orange will recognize her gift for creating settings that feel slightly unsteady, places where human relationships become as unsettling as any ghost story. Hunger and Thirst, releasing June 2, 2026, continues that tradition while leaning more openly into gothic territory.

Continue reading “Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller: A haunting story about the ache to belong” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Children by Melissa Albert is a haunting story about the danger of becoming someone else’s myth

Mandy Webster

There’s something deeply unsettling about the idea of growing up inside a story that never really belonged to you. In The Children by Melissa Albert, releasing June 2, 2026, childhood becomes both a performance and a prison as two siblings struggle to survive the legacy their mother built from their lives. The result is a darkly hypnotic literary fantasy that feels as though it’s flickering between reality and nightmare the entire time you’re reading it.

Get your copy of The Children today!

Guinevere and Ennis Sharpe grew up as the unwilling inspirations for their mother Edith’s wildly beloved Ninth City fantasy novels. To the world, they were magical children adventuring through an enchanted realm. In reality, they were neglected kids growing up isolated in rural Vermont, half-feral and largely abandoned while their mother disappeared into the mythology she was creating around them. Albert builds both timelines—the children’s traumatic upbringing and adult Guin’s unraveling in the present day—with a sense of inevitable catastrophe. Every chapter feels like a countdown toward something terrible waiting just beyond the firelight.

Continue reading “The Children by Melissa Albert is a haunting story about the danger of becoming someone else’s myth” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Bone of My Bone by Johanna van Veen is a haunting folk horror novel about faith, fear, and the stories people choose to believe

Mandy Webster

War turns people into monsters long before anything supernatural enters the picture, and Bone of My Bone understands that better than most horror novels. Set during the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, Johanna van Veen’s latest is brutal, atmospheric, and deeply philosophical, blending folk horror with theological questions about morality, sainthood, and the terrifying power of blind faith.

Get your copy of Bone of My Bone from my independent online bookstore today!

The novel follows Sister Ursula, a young nun fleeing the destruction of her convent, and Elsebeth, a sharp-witted peasant woman trying to survive a countryside ravaged by soldiers, starvation, and death. After escaping a violent attack, the two women come into possession of a skull believed to belong to a saint. Legend says reuniting the skull with the saint’s body will grant a wish, and the pair set off across the Bavarian wilderness hoping salvation might still exist somewhere in the ruins of the world.

Continue reading “Bone of My Bone by Johanna van Veen is a haunting folk horror novel about faith, fear, and the stories people choose to believe” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Salomé by Leslie Baird is a hypnotic literary thriller that turns a dreamy French escape into something far darker

Mandy Webster

There’s a particular kind of danger attached to reinvention, especially when it happens far from home. In Salomé by Leslie Baird, that danger arrives wrapped in heat-soaked French afternoons, magnetic attraction, conspiracy, and the seductive promise that maybe death itself can be outwitted. Releasing May 19, 2026, this gothic-tinged literary thriller moves like a fever dream, gradually tightening from atmospheric travel fantasy into something deeply unsettling.

Get your copy of Salomé from my independent online bookstore today!

One of the novel’s greatest strengths is its setting. Baird captures northwestern France so vividly that even the oppressive heat and lack of air conditioning somehow feel intoxicating. The small-town atmosphere is lush, languid, and quietly claustrophobic, creating the perfect backdrop for Courtney’s growing obsession with Salomé and her family. The relationship between Courtney and Salomé mirrors that setting beautifully at first—warm, inviting, almost innocent in its intensity. Their connection feels youthful and sincere, the kind of intimacy that blooms quickly when you’re untethered from your ordinary life.

Continue reading “Salomé by Leslie Baird is a hypnotic literary thriller that turns a dreamy French escape into something far darker” →