10 gothic books for long nights

Long nights suit books where the ordinary turns strange: a salesman's bedroom, a Dartmoor moor, a governess's view of two children. In «Metamorphosis» Kafka keeps the prose flat and exact while a family rearranges itself around a problem it cannot name, and in «The Turn of the Screw» Henry James lets you decide whether the danger is outside the governess or inside her. These are stories of dread and desire in close rooms, and they ask for the kind of attention a long, dark evening gives you.

1.Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka, 1915

A salesman wakes as a vermin and his family slowly reorganises around the problem of keeping him. Read it for the flat, exact prose and the horror of ordinary rooms.

Was he an animal if music could captivate him so? It seemed to him that he was being shown the way to the unknown nourishment he had been yearning for. He was determined to make his way forward to his sister and tug at her skirt to show her she might come into his room with her violin, as no-one appreciated her playing here as much as he would.
2.The Hound of the Baskervilles

Arthur Conan Doyle, 1902

A doctor, a cursed family and a great black hound on Dartmoor: Holmes and Watson test whether a legend can be murdered.
3.Dracula

Bram Stoker, 1897

A solicitor's business trip, a seaside storm and a doctor's case notes, told through diaries, letters and telegrams so that dread reads like found evidence.
4.Carmilla

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, 1872

A lonely girl in a castle falls for a beautiful guest who arrives by night—a vampire story told through desire, dread and ambiguity.
5.Short Fiction

Mary Shelley, 1829

Mary Shelley's short stories: revenge, shipwrecks, immortals and social climbers—gothic invention in miniature, with the same fierce eye for guilt and longing as Frankenstein.

Am I, then, immortal? This is a question which I have asked myself, by day and night, for now three hundred and three years, and yet cannot answer it. I detected a grey hair amidst my brown locks this very day—that surely signifies decay. Yet it may have remained concealed there for three hundred years—for some persons have become entirely white-headed before twenty years of age.
6.The Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe, 1850

Poe's detective Dupin, a whirlpool, a black cat, a revenge vow: tales that made detection and dread into modern literary pleasures.
7.The Turn of the Screw

Henry James, 1898

A governess alone with two charming children begins to see figures no one else admits—and to wonder whether she is their protector or their danger.
8.Το τελευταίο σπίτι της οδού Νίντλες

Catriona Ward, 2022

A terrified, gentle-voiced narrator and an eleven-year-old disappearance on his street, told and retold. A gothic puzzle that reads like a fever you can't stop watching.
9.The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886

A short, fast Victorian mystery that works as a thriller and as a sharp study of respectability, appetite and the parts of ourselves we prefer to keep out of sight.
10.The Phantom of the Opera

Gaston Leroux, 1910

A masked figure haunts the Paris Opera, secretly tutoring a young singer — a gothic thriller about genius, ugliness, and what love demands.