Beach reads—we usually associate them with the summer. A steamy romance, a cozy seaside mystery, a horror story of beach parties and blood.
Those are a great time, but right now in the northern hemisphere, summer is waning. Depending on where you are in the world, it might already be dead in more ways than a date on the calendar, with the trees losing their green, the sun feeling fainter in the sky, and a stiff breeze chilling your skin, and it may or may not be tinged with pumpkin spice.
But even as the season dims and cools, the beach lingers right where you left it. Maybe you don’t feel up for visiting in the cold weather. In fact, it might not even want you there.
I have a soft spot for the beach outside the thrills of summertime. There’s something exquisitely morbid, even gothic, about gray skies over dark blue waves, and I’m enthralled by uneasy stories that capture this feeling, even when set in the summertime, as if the season is only a mask the beach wears before returning to its true grim nature. I’m so in love with that atmosphere, I’ve written it into multiple stories, including my upcoming modern coastal gothic All the Hearts You Eat, and I devour them when I find them. Here are a few books that will coil you in that delicious dismal atmosphere and never let go.
They Drown Our Daughters by Katrina Monroe
What better way to begin than with a book taking place at a haunted locale by the name of Cape Disappointment? We arrive outside the tourist season, where Meredith Strand has left her wife, taking their daughter back to her family’s home to stay with Meredith’s ailing mother. But family can be a curse, and as we discover early on (helped by a handy family tree!), Meredith’s family has endured a fate of being hunted by the sea for generations. If she isn’t careful, her daughter might be next. From the desolate lighthouse to the troublesome water to the secrets waiting in the depths, there’s a doomed nature to Cape Disappointment’s dread, but each clue into the past makes you eager to endure the next wave.
Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth
I almost started the list with this one, but I realized how difficult a book Plain Bad Heroines can be to describe on a plot level, let alone characters, and didn’t want vague-talk out the gate. It’s the story of a tragic love between two students at a school for girls overlooking a dreary coast, and it’s the story of Audrey, Harper, and Merritt, and the events surrounding a movie being made about those two students, and it’s also a story about all the forbidden loves the school has seen over time. The coiling sapphic narratives both nourish and consume each other. It’s never dizzying, instead consistently immersive. Brookhants School for Girls is a primary character here, if not the main one, and its heavy personality makes the finding and losing of love to its horrific secrets all the more entrancing.
“Inventory” by Carmen Maria Machado
This one isn’t a book, but you’ll have to bear with me on that, partly because it’s my list, partly because you should be reading Her Body and Other Parties anyway, and partly because the atmosphere in this story is the perfect somber pitch. It tells of the end of the world, in which a lethal disease passes from person to person by touch, told through the lens of a woman cataloging the people she’s had sex with over the course of her life. The disease spreading by touch is key to this beautiful story’s focus on the people we meet, and the ones we lose, whether it be to time, illness, or a need to move on. Part of that migration brings our protagonist to the seaside, where for a while it seems she might be free of the apocalypse. But connection is wired into our species.
Yellow Jessamine by Caitlin Starling
I’m realizing now that setting as character can’t help being a defining quality when you’re looking at atmosphere—Yellow Jessamine fits the bill, too, both with the port city of Delphinium and the soon-to-be-overgrown manor of Evelyn Perdanu, filled with secrets, science, and the pall of death. Decay rules this world, a unifying factor of land, sea, and people, and no amount of loyalty from Evelyn’s attendant Violetta or betrayal from other merchants and nobles can deter what’s to come. This is a brisk, engrossing novella by the sea, and for me, Starling at her gothic best.
Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward
Like Plain Bad Heroines, this is another where it’s hard to describe the plot and characters due to the twining narratives, not only across time and perspective, but into what we know and don’t know is happening at Whistler Bay. Though this book begins one summer and captures a level of Stephen King charm in its early coming-of-age narrative, don’t let the sunshine fool you. There’s a chill to Whistler Bay, between hints of a vicious presence lurking the coast and the way death looms over the young characters. The memoir approach gives the entire setting a sense of constant loss, its brilliance slipping through your fingers as you read it. The book only gets more brazen, taking wild turns through time, perspective, and reality, but all the while, the wind keeps howling through the stones along the beach.
Red Skies in the Morning by Nadia Bulkin
Bulkin’s debut novella is maximally dour, telling of a world plagued by paracontagions that infect you via video, giving you seven haunted, nightmare-touched days to show the same video to someone else before the invading specter destroys you on its way out. To make matters worse, an unknown murderer dubbed Video Man has taken to purposely infecting people. Think The Ring, spreading and spreading, and with a serial killer on top. Set in a coastal city and following two sisters, the younger mostly raised by the elder, Red Skies in the Morning is a fascinating look at inevitability and tragedy while also creative and heartrending. This book has a limited release and may be tough to find at the time of this writing, but it deserves a wide release. Without spoiling anything, the final scene looking out on the water is both magnetic and utterly excruciating.
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