Gothic
Running Away with the Fairies
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Here in Avalon was never supposed to be about fairies. I’d envisioned the novel—a literary thriller about two sisters, one of whom, Cecilia, goes missing after getting involved with a mysterious interactive theatre troupe—as a straightforwardly Gothic cult story: complete with plenty of murders to solve. And, two or so drafts in, it still wasn’t…
Mystical Threads: Spirit Mediums and Psychics in Crime and Suspense Fiction
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I never met my paternal grandmother. She died before I was born, but from a few family photos, I formed a picture of a smartly turned-out woman with warm brown eyes, a wavy, blunt-cut bob and a weakness for silk scarves. Deeply respected in her small north-eastern England mining town, she was a pillar of…
Sinking Into the Gothic Gloom: My Favourite Works
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I’ve always struggled with some of the prevailing definitions of ‘gothic’ fiction. Tradition dictates there should be elements of fear, threat, woe, that hauntings should occur and vile things must transpire. Gloominess and atmosphere are everything: crumbling castles (gothic architecture inhabits many gothic novels, see Thornfield, Manderlay, High Place, the castle of Otranto), windswept coastlines,…
Brave Women in Mysterious Circumstances: A Reading List
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When I was 12 or 13, I read a book called The Other Side of Dark by Joan Lowery Nixon. There wasn’t a ton of YA in those days (this was before cell phones and streaming music, back when we had to look up information in encyclopedias and dinosaurs roamed the earth) so whenever a…
Elizabeth Hand on Playwriting, Haunted Houses, and Shirley Jackson
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This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. A Haunting on the Hill is now available from Mulholland Books. Olivia Rutigliano: I’m so excited because this is the first continuation of The Haunting of Hill House that has been sanctioned by the Shirley Jackson estate. I’m so interested in how you came to this…
The Magic of Sisterhood: Five Supernatural Sister Stories
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Halloween season has always been steeped in sisterly magic. Think of the Sanderson sisters in Hocus Pocus or the Owens sisters in Practical Magic. They set the stage for powerful supernatural stories in the 90s, and we adored them. That’s because there is magic in stories about sisters. When we discover sisters on the page,…
The Western Meets Weird Fiction: A Roundtable Discussion
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Once a narrowly defined genre—set in the American frontier of the 19th Century—the definition of Western has expanded with contemporary takes from such authors as Cormac McCarthy, Ivy Pochoda, Alma Katsu, Jim Harrison and Louise Erdrich. And now, along comes HOT IRON AND COLD BLOOD: An Anthology of the Weird West (September 26, 2023; Dead Sky Publishing),…
6 Creepy Novels Featuring Murder Houses
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There’s something beautiful about ugliness. We all have it simmering under the surface. But we make damn sure not to show it. Why? In my debut, The Stranger Upstairs, Sarah Slade is a popular influencer who struggles with a dark side. Her marriage is falling apart and her career is on a knife’s edge. She…