Gothic Historical Fiction

Traveling to be with her fiance's terminally ill mother in her last days, Saoirse Read expected her introduction to the family's ancestral home would be bittersweet. But the stark thrust of Langdon Hall against the cliff and the hundred darkened windows in its battered walls are almost as forbidding as the woman who lies wasting inside. Her fiance's parents make no secret of their distaste for Saoirse, and their feelings have long since spread to their son. Or perhaps it is only the shadows of her mind suggesting she's unwelcome, seizing on her fears while her beloved grieves?

When Jane’s lover, Tom, returns from the navy to find her unhappily married to his betrayer, Jane is caught in an impossible situation. Still reeling from the loss of her mother at the hands of the witchfinder, Jane has no choice but to continue her dangerous work as a healer while keeping her young daughter safe. But as Tom searches for a way for him and Jane to be together, the witchfinder is still at large. Filled with vengeance, the witchfinder will stop at nothing in his quest to rid England of the scourge of witchcraft.

On a snowy night in February in a penthouse high above Fifth Avenue, Delphine's mystical talent leads to a tragedy between two brothers. Devastated and disconsolate, Delphine renounces her gift and returns to her old life in the south of France, where Picasso, Matisse, and the Fitzgeralds are summering. There, Delphine comes to question everything and everyone she loves - her art, her magick, her family, and Mathieu....

Nestled within Paris' historic Palais Royal is a jewelry store unlike any other. La Fantasie Russie is owned by Pavel Orloff, protégé to the famous Faberge, and is known by the city's fashion elite as the place to find the rarest of gemstones and the most unique designs. But war has transformed Paris from a city of style and romance to a place of fear and mourning. In the summer of 1918, in places where lovers used to walk, widows now wander alone.

It begins with a rumor, an exciting whisper. Anything to break the tedium of the harem for the shah's eldest daughter. People speak of a man with a face so vile, it would make a hangman faint, but a voice as sweet as an angel's kiss. A master of illusion and stealth. A masked performer known only as Vachon. For once the truth will outshine the tales. On her birthday the shah gifts his eldest daughter, Afsar, a circus. With the circus comes a man who will change everything.

With a modest inheritance and the three gowns that comprise her entire wardrobe, Theodora leaves Edinburgh—and a disappointed suitor—far behind. She is bound for Romania, where tales of vampires are still whispered, to visit an old friend and write the book that will bring her true independence. She arrives at a magnificent, decaying castle in the Carpathians, replete with eccentric inhabitants, including the castle’s master, Count Andrei Dragulescu.

Branded an outcast by the noble branch of his werewolf clan, Cort Renier had come to San Francisco seeking fortune—and revenge. What he found was a mysterious beauty who could not—or would not—reveal who she truly was. At first glance she seemed vulnerable and afraid, like so many girls caught up in the debauchery of the city's whiskey-soaked gambling dens. But one look into her stunning turquoise eyes and he knew he'd found the winning hand.

In this dazzling debut, Taylor M. Polites crafts a Southern gothic novel that mines classic literary archetypes while shaping them in new ways. Set in Reconstruction-era Alabama, The Rebel Wife opens with Augusta Branson losing her husband to a terrible blood fever. Now she and her son must fend for themselves in a community being destroyed by violence.

Clara grew up believing that her mother's family had disowned them. But the grandmother Clara never knew is now entreating her to visit Thurnley Hall, the family seat in Yorkshire. The old lady is on her deathbed and anxious to disclose vital family secrets before it's too late - for Clara's unborn child may be cursed with a horrible fate.

All children mythologize their birth... So begins the prologue of reclusive author Vida Winter's beloved collection of stories, long famous for the mystery of the missing thirteenth tale. The enigmatic Winter has always kept her violent and tragic past a secret. Now old and ailing, she summons a biographer to tell the truth about her extraordinary life: Margaret Lea, a young woman for whom the secret of her own birth remains an ever-present pain.

Ten-year-old Helen and her summer guardian, Flora, are isolated together in Helen's decaying family house while her father is doing secret war work in Oak Ridge during the final months of World War II. At three Helen lost her mother and the beloved grandmother who raised her has just died. A fiercely imaginative child, Helen is desperate to keep her house intact with all its ghosts and stories. Flora, her late mother's twenty-two-year old first cousin, who cries at the drop of a hat, is ardently determined to do her best for Helen.

It is winter 1863, and Richard Shenstone, aged 17, has been sent down - "rusticated" - from Cambridge under a cloud of suspicion. Addicted to opium and tormented by sexual desire, he finds temporary refuge in a dilapidated old mansion on the southern English coast inhabited by his newly impoverished mother and his sister, Effie. Soon, graphic and threatening letters begin to circulate among his neighbors, and Richard finds himself the leading suspect in a series of crimes and misdemeanors ranging from vivisection to murder.

Sandrine Salome flees New York for her grandmother's Paris mansion to escape her dangerous husband. The house, famous for its lavish art collection and elegant salons, is mysteriously closed up. Although her grandmother insists it's dangerous for Sandrine to visit, she defies her and meets Julien Duplessi, a mesmerizing young architect. Together they explore the hidden night world of Paris, the forbidden occult underground, and Sandrine's deepest desires.

Chicago, 1881. The idea of a female detective is virtually unheard of. But when famed crime buster Allan Pinkerton opens his agency's doors to a handful of women, one intrepid actress with her own troubled past is driven to defy convention and take on a new and dangerous role. Since the age of 11, when her mother was murdered, the life of the theater is all Lilly Long has known. Now 22, she has blossomed into an accomplished Shakespearean actress.

Can a curse strike twice in a woman's life? In 1854, 17-year-old chambermaid Clara Crofton was dismissed from Gravesend Hall for having fallen in love with Richard Blackwood, the younger son of the house. Alone in the world, Clara found a tenuous position as a seamstress, but she always blamed the Gravesend curse for the disaster that had befallen her - and for Richard's death soon after in the Crimean War.

When Helen Honeycutt falls in love with Emmet Justice, a charismatic television journalist who has recently lost his wife in a tragic accident, their sudden marriage creates a rift between her new husband and his oldest friends, who resent Helen's intrusion into their tightly knit circle. Hoping to mend fences, the newlyweds join the group for a summer at his late wife's family home in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains.

Jessie Speer set out for California, following her father's dream which turned into a nightmare and killed her family. Now, snow-clogged mountains, beautiful but heartless, held her prisoner. She prayed for a miracle. Blizzard after blizzard left her aching with cold, one step away from starvation. As months passed, Jessie almost stopped believing in warmth, safety and rescue. Only Daniel Bear was willing to brave the fearsome mountain to answer the stranded settler's desperate need.

The House of Erzulie tells the eerily intertwined stories of an ill-fated young couple in the 1850s and the troubled historian who discovers their writings in the present day. Emilie St. Ange, daughter of a Creole slaveowning family in Louisiana, rebels against her parents by embracing spiritualism and advocating the abolition of slavery. Isidore, her biracial, French-born husband, is horrified by the brutalities of plantation life and becomes unhinged by an obsessive affair with a notorious New Orleans vodou practitioner.

Northanger Abbey is the coming-of-age story of Catherine Morland, who is taken to the fashionable resort of Bath with her friends, the Allens. While in Bath, she meets Henry Tilney and his sister Eleanor. The Tilneys invite Catherine to Northanger Abbey, their family estate. Catherine, an avid reader of Gothic novels, soon becomes obsessed with the thought that possible atrocities are going on at the abbey.

Thirty miles off the coast of San Francisco lie the Farallon Islands, known to sailors as the Devil’s Teeth. Despite their fearsome reputation, their remote nature appeals to young Lucy Riley, who in 1859 seeks a new start as a teacher to the lighthouse keepers’ children. But Lucy brings treacherous secrets with her, including a name that isn’t hers and a past she can’t escape. On the island, she meets Will Sisson, a mysterious man who seems to recognize her name—but not her face. Wary of Will at first, Lucy slowly starts to trust him.