A generation of writers raised on Shirley Jackson and Daphne du Maurier has started publishing. The results are, mostly, excellent.
I was not expecting to be writing about the gothic novel in 2026. The form had felt, for most of my reading life, like a settled category, something you visited occasionally through Daphne du Maurier or We Have Always Lived in the Castle or the occasional Sarah Waters, but not a thing that was being actively produced at any meaningful scale by contemporary writers. Gothic was, to my mental filing system, a historical mode.
I was wrong about this. The last two years have produced, by my count, at least a dozen novels that are recognizably gothic, are being read seriously by adult readers, and are being published by actual presses with real marketing budgets. A genre I'd treated as archival has quietly started generating new work. I want to say a little about why, and about the handful of books that have most convinced me the comeback is real.
What counts as gothic
Quickly, because I know this is a contested category. The gothic novel, as I use the term, has roughly four structural features. A house, or a confined architectural space, that is itself a character. An inherited trouble, usually familial, that the protagonist has to reckon with. A slow, dread-inducing pace, rather than a thriller's forward momentum. And a tolerance for the unresolved, for endings that keep their secrets rather than explain them away.
This is a narrow definition. It excludes a lot of what gets marketed as gothic, vampire fiction, most horror, a lot of dark fantasy. I draw the line tight on purpose. The books I'm talking about are, specifically, in the lineage of Jackson, du Maurier, Rebecca-style gothic, not the Anne Rice / Ann Radcliffe / horror-adjacent end.
What I've been reading
Three writers have done most of the heavy lifting, in my reading of the genre's recent revival.
The first has written a novel set in a coastal English house in the 1970s, about a woman who returns to her childhood home to sort out her mother's estate and finds, in the process, that her understanding of her own early years has been, in significant ways, wrong. The book's tonal control is remarkable. Every chapter earns its dread. The final twenty pages do not explain the mystery so much as make peace with it.
The second is set in contemporary upstate New York, in a family house that has been sold to strangers and reacquired by the protagonist's sister. This is a genuinely contemporary gothic. WiFi, phones, ordinary modern life, which means the dread has to be built out of material other than architectural gloom. The novelist does this by attending, in microscopic detail, to the family's own long-running misunderstandings. The ghost, in this book, is the family's memory of itself.
The third, which is the one I'd recommend first, is a short novel set in rural Wales. It does the genre's traditional work, inheritance, confined space, accumulated family trouble, at novella length, which forces a discipline that the traditional gothic often lacks. It's 180 pages. You could read it in a night. The ending will, if the genre lands for you, keep you up.
Why now
I've thought about this more than is reasonable. My best guesses, ranked by plausibility:
First, the cultural moment favors the form. The gothic novel is a genre of inherited trouble. It is, structurally, about living with the consequences of decisions you did not make and did not have the option of refusing. That is a resonant emotional frame for the present, economically, ecologically, politically. A reading audience that lives in that frame will find the genre speaks to it in ways it hasn't spoken for decades.
The gothic is a genre of inherited trouble, of living with the consequences of decisions you did not make and did not have the option of refusing.
Second, the pace of the form matches what a certain kind of reader wants right now. Contemporary life is fast, distributed, and attentionally fragmented. A gothic novel, read slowly in the evenings, is a deliberate repudiation of that pace. It insists on sitting in one place, in one house, with one family, for as long as it takes. The reading experience itself is the argument. Readers who are tired of the frantic now are, I suspect, finding the form quietly restorative.
Third, there is a generational dynamic at work. Writers in their late thirties and early forties, the ones publishing first novels now, grew up on the back catalog of great 20th-century gothic: Jackson, du Maurier, Waters. These books were, at the time, shelved in the "women's fiction" ghetto of the American bookstore, which meant a lot of young readers picked them up precisely because nobody was paying attention. Those readers have grown up. They have absorbed the form. They are now producing it.
What I'm hoping for
More of it, obviously. The current wave of gothic novels has been small enough that each book still feels like an event. I'd like this to continue, and I'd like the publishing industry to notice. Gothic is a form that rewards careful attention from editors and careful marketing from publishers. If it gets thrown into the maw of algorithmic recommendation and influencer-driven discovery, the form will not survive the encounter, because the form's virtues, pace, patience, the uneasy unresolved, are not things that surface well in that economy.
The best outcome for the current revival is for it to stay small, for the readers to stay dedicated, for the writers to keep publishing every two or three years rather than every year, and for the critical establishment to start paying attention. I'm doing what I can, on this blog. It is not much. It is, at least, a record of what I think is worth reading.
I'll be writing about one or two of the specific books in more detail over the next month. They are worth their own essays. For now, know that the genre is back. Sit somewhere quiet. Read a Jackson novel or a du Maurier, to get your palate ready. Then find the contemporary work. It's good. It's better than I expected. It's going to last.