There are a lot of ways to drive into Cleveland, Ohio, but my favorite was always coming up from the south, from Akron. At one point on that drive there’s a bunch of big buildings with big smokestacks (I think they’re steel mills but to be honest I enjoyed them for the vibes, not for the details, you know?). One of those smokestacks sometimes shot fire into the air instead of smoke. Right around that same point in the drive, you go under a bridge that’s under another bridge that’s under another bridge, all of them criss-crossing one above the other, all of them with high chain link fences along the sides, and the fences have rusted, and streaks of rust have run down the concrete sides of the bridges. Taken all together, it’s grim and it’s ugly and it looks like a set from The Walking Dead, and it is, to me, the best part of that drive into Cleveland. Growing up, I never saw an abandoned building I didn’t want to go into (and only a healthy dose of Being a Scaredy-Cat kept me out of almost all of them). There’s just something about the feeling of a place that has been deeply neglected that I have always found interesting.
I love it in movies and shows and, of course, in books, too. If you’re like me in this regard, you ought to check out the following books!
Mexican Gothic by Sylvia Moreno Garcia
When wealthy socialite Noemí Taboada receives an alarming letter from her recently-married cousin, she travels to the cousin’s English husband’s family estate, High Place, in the Mexican countryside to check on her and make sure all is well. Upon her arrival she finds High Place inhospitable and the family strange, her cousin is unwell and behaving oddly, and an aura of uncanny danger hangs over the house and its environs. Can Noemí discover the estate’s secrets in time to rescue her cousin—and to save herself, now that she’s entangled in High Place’s mysteries?
High Place was such a moody and atmospheric setting, when reading this book I felt like I could all but smell the mildew and feel the damp and the pervasive sense of dread. If you love historical horror with modern sensibilities set in a decaying, once-grand old house, then…well you’ve probably already read Mexican Gothic, but if you love all those things and you haven’t yet read this one, definitely give it a shot.
We Can Never Leave this Place by Eric LaRocca
In a war-ravaged apartment building, Mara has just lost her father and is now living alone with her cold and distant mother. Unfortunately for Mara, they don’t stay alone for very long, as her mother invites a very disturbing and bizarre guest to stay in their apartment, ostensibly to help protect the family with Mara’s father gone.
This is a novella, which means that even with all its heavy themes and surreal content, it’s a very fast read. It’s also incredibly immersive for all its strangeness, and reading this novella left me feeling as if the apartment was falling down around me right along with the characters—as if my world, too, was coming apart. On top of all this, LaRocca has a gorgeous way with words, which is all the more striking when juxtaposed against the often viscerally horrible things he writes about. If you’re looking for a quick book unlike most anything you’ve read before, and if you want to witness something beautifully-executed but feel really bad in the process, this novella is a must-read.
The Needfire by MK Hardy
Norah Mackenzie needs a fresh start, and thinks she’s found it (as well as the solution to certain financial problems) in her engagement to a wealthy man in another part of Scotland. The letters they’ve exchanged have left her hopeful that this new chapter in her life will be a good one, but when Norah arrives at her husband-to-be’s home, Corrain House, nothing is quite as she expected. The surrounding village strikes her as strange, with unfamiliar customs. Corrain House itself sits precariously on a cliff edge, and is in ill-repair. Her husband rushes their wedding and then withdraws, giving Norah no indication that their previous correspondences meant anything to him. And the housekeeper is at once forbidding and alluring.
This is a beautiful addition to classic gothic literature with a modern touch. Putting this one down felt like coming up for air and rediscovering the world I actually live in, as opposed to the dark and crumbling Scottish estate. MK Hardy, the pen name for the duo who wrote this novel together, created a deeply compelling, incredibly engaging world populated by people who feel real even in the increasingly unreal circumstances surrounding them. This book comes out on July 31st, 2025 and I cannot recommend it enough.
Cold Eternity by S. A. Barnes
In the distant future, after having her idealism shattered and being made complicit in a potentially dangerous scandal, Halley needs to make herself scarce, and she figures the best way to do this is to accept a strange job opportunity; she goes to work as the lone caretaker on a spaceship that started its life as a high-end cryogenics facility before obsolescence necessitated its transition to a museum ship, before finally being closed to the public forever. The ship is all but falling apart and in need of constant repairs, and Halley’s job demands her attention every three hours on the dot, but it beats whatever threats or manipulations await her if she stays anywhere on the grid.
This entry is, obviously, different than the others in this list. A sci-fi horror novel, this book explores the idea of the falling apart of institutions, scientific theories, and locations that haven’t even been created yet in our current timeline. But the setting was so strikingly perfect for this story, a blending of the futuristic elements expected in sci-fi with current-day fears and concerns, all past-their-prime and all but crumbling around Halley as she navigates strange occurrences and increasing danger. If you are into the gothic tropes but also love fresh storytelling and science fiction, anything by S. A. Barnes is perfect, but this book in particular takes the cake for me.
Nothing But Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw
A group of thrill-seeking friends who have spent a lot of their time doing amateur ghost hunts gather together in a purportedly-haunted Hien-era mansion in Japan for the wedding of two among them. They bring their baggage with them, interpersonal tensions and conflicts flaring up even before the ghost—a much more real ghost than any of them reckoned with—makes its haunting appearance.
I read this book a few years back when it first came out, and despite my notoriously terrible memory, this one sticks with me. The book is very self-aware in a way that sometimes gives a fun sense of irreverence among the horror, the inclusion of Japanese folklore inside the historic Japanese mansion setting provided a rich backdrop for the story, and the characters are complex and realistic.
***
