Ten of the Best Gothic Novels
‘The resonance of the setting and the truth of the emotions involved are key in gothic novels,’ Geraldine Brennan explains. ‘Many of last year’s vampire novels were made toothless by a bland US high school setting. The contemporary Yorkshire village in Matt Haig’s The Radleys is a very different setting from the South Carolina of Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl’s Beautiful Creatures but it is a real place, not sub- Emmerdale. The setting of a gothic novel is likely to include a home, or somewhere that has once been a home, or a retreat. This can vary in scale from Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre to the forest hut that Agnes is banished to in My Swordhand is Singing. There is something unpleasant that must kept out of the home, or expelled if it’s already got in. If there doesn’t seem to be a problem, there is.’
The Spiderwick Chronicles Volume 1: The Field Guide
Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi, Simon & Schuster, 978 0 689 83738 8, £6.99 hbk
As a just-chilling-enough gothic fantasy choice for younger readers, Spiderwick defeats Lemony Snicket with the richness of its imagined world, illustrated as if by a Victorian obsessive, and its freedom from adult knowing- ness. The Grace children move into Aunt Lucinda’s creaky, decrepit mansion for thoroughly modern reasons – their parents are not dead or missing, but divorced. Troubled Jared finds Uncle Arthur’s guide to the creatures who are besieging them and five volumes of adventures follow. (7+)
My Swordhand is Singing
Marcus Sedgwick, Orion, 978 1 84255 558 3, £6.99 pbk A village on the edge of the
6 Books for Keeps No.184 September 2010 10
Here Geraldine Brennan chooses her top ten gothic novels.
Mother Forest somewhere in Eastern Europe in the days before electricity is forced to live with its ‘hostages’, which are never identified as vampires but are no less terrifying for that. The war between the feared Shadow Queen and the Winter King has driven itinerant woodcutter Tomas to drink. In this tightly paced, understated and chilling story, his son Peter must fight the next battle. (9+)
Century
Sarah Singleton, Simon & Schuster, 978 1 416 90135 8, £5.99 pbk
A huge world is contained in Sarah Singleton’s slender debut novel, which won the Booktrust Teenage Prize in 2005. Mercy and Charity, sisters born in Victoria’s reign, are doomed to an unending winter of long nights because their grieving widowed father has wrapped the family home in a spell. Mercy, whose
sense of loss and powerlessness is channelled into rage against the uncommunicative adults, chases the truth like a terrier after she discovers a woman’s body frozen in the lake. (9+)
Set in Stone
Linda Newbery, Definitions, 978 0 09 945133 4, £6.99 pbk
A young artist, Samuel Godwin, arrives at a solitary house in 1898 to tutor the daughters of a wealthy hermit with refined tastes. Rather than the traditional crumbling pile, Fourwinds is at the cutting edge of Arts and Crafts elegance. The contrast between the light and beauty evoked by the setting and the unsavoury family secrets that
Godwin finds within its walls is just one of the pleasures of this masterfully composed novel. (11+)
The Moth Diaries
Rachel Klein, Faber, 978 0 571 25948 9, £6.99 pbk
For a 16-year-old grieving for a lost father, life at a girls’ prep school on the East Coast of the US in the 1960s is traumatic in its claustrophobic intensity, even before she forms the theory that her best friend is the prey of a vampire masquerading as the aloof new girl down the corridor. The narrator’s
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