Since 1764, when Horace Walpole captivated readers with The Castle of Otranto, gothic novels have been shaped by, and have sometimes been synonymous with, their locales. “With all genres, setting matters,” says Yah Yah Scholfield, debut author of the Southern gothic On Sundays She Picked Flowers (Saga, Jan. 2026). “But with gothic fiction in particular, the setting is a character all its own. You can’t have Wuthering Heights without the moors, and you can’t have Rebecca without Manderley.”
PW spoke with Scholfield and other authors about the importance of place in their forthcoming gothic horror novels. As in real estate, it’s all about location, location, location.
Hooked on classics
Scholfield’s gothic references include Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved, particularly “the concept of this place that is so sick and heavy with human living,” they say. Their debut follows Judith Rice, who as an adult in 1965 flees her abusive mother abusive to a run-down house in the forests of southern Georgia, where she contends with the ghosts of the house’s violent past as well as her own.
The American literary canon also influenced the next novel from Vincent Tirado, who writes horror for adults and teens. After watching the recent TV miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher, which draws on that short story and other works by Edgar Allan Poe, Tirado wanted to write something in a claustrophobic family home.
That sparked You Should Have Been Nicer to My Mom (Morrow, Mar. 2026), billed as “a modern gothic horror.” The Abreu clan, trapped together in the old family house, grapple with a secret revealed in the patriarch’s will: one of them is a demon, who, if not exorcised, will damn them all. When the night devolves into a series of feuds and scandalous revelations, it’s up to the patriarch’s favorite descendant, Xiomara, to find out the truth. “She starts to relive a lot of her memories as she’s walking through the house,” Tirado says. “It’s all about her relationship with the house as well as with the extended family.”
In The Glowing Hours (Hell’s Hundred, Feb. 2026), Leila Siddiqui looks to a seminal point in gothic history: the June 1816 gathering at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland where Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein. “I often wondered, What if the villa was actually haunted?” she says. Siddiqui was intrigued by how the constant storms of the so-called year without a summer—a global weather anomaly caused by a volcanic eruption—kept the house party confined to the villa, or, as Siddiqui phrases it, “caught in its trap.”
She reimagines the historical moment through the perspective of Mehrunissa Begum, an Indian woman of means who, after becoming stranded in London, finds work as a maid for the Shelleys. Escape proves impossible, both from the house and the house party.
Run for the hills
A road trip through what L.L. Madrid calls “three quirky towns in Arizona” led to her debut, My Lips, Her Voice (Creature, Oct.). The book’s present-day Copper City setting takes inspiration from Jerome, Ariz., which Madrid says was once known as “the wickedest town in the West”; Tombstone, Ariz., and its Wild West nostalgia tourism; and Bisbee, Ariz., with the “beautiful, brutal” open-pit copper mine nearby. Small towns, she says, can “really draw some people in, but others feel like, This place is too small for me. It’s not what I envision for my life.”
In the book, three high schoolers are caught between this push and pull: Mara and her ex-girlfriend Zadie, who are eager to leave Copper City behind, and Mara’s cousin Audrey, whose dream is to stay in town and run her aunt’s bakery. After Mara’s body is found in the local copper mine, which is said to be haunted, and her spirit takes up residence in Audrey’s body, the three teens band together to find Mara’s killer. The mine, Madrid says, puts a “southwest spin” on a traditional moor, luring characters to it despite the creeping sense of dread.
Debut author Linda Hamilton’s The Fourth Wife (Kensington, Mar. 2026) takes place in 1882 Salt Lake City, in recently colonized Utah. Hazel Russon, a Mormon, gives up her dreams of a monogamous life with her sweetheart when a high-ranking church leader orders her to become the fourth wife of Jacob Manwaring, whose dilapidated mansion overlooks the mouth of a canyon in Salt Lake Valley.
The paranormal nature of the house itself embodies the social pressures trapping Mormon women during this era. “Hazel and the other wives know that the house swallows all sounds,” Hamilton says. “That, in many ways, represents the silence and the pressure on the women to remain compliant, to not voice their issues and not feel that they will ever actually be heard within this strict religious patriarchy.”
Global terror
Middle grade author Maria Tureaud situated her adult debut, This House Will Feed (Kensington, Jan. 2026), in her native Ireland, specifically in the coastal town of Kilrush and the limestone landscape of the Burren, “a hot spot for sightings of folklorish things like the púca,” she says. “With all of the ancient burial grounds there, it’s already haunted. So it was easy to take the setting and create a house that’s feeding off of folklore.”
The novel begins in 1848, when Maggie O’Shaughnessy’s only escape from the Great Famine is a risky offer from landowner Lady Catherine: impersonate Catherine’s deceased daughter and collect the widow’s pension that would be owed to her were she living, thereby keeping everyone on the estate fed. Upon Maggie’s arrival at the mansion, eerie, disembodied voices in the house beg her to feed them, too.
Traditional Japanese architecture informs the paranormal practicalities of Kylie Lee Baker’s Japanese Gothic (Hanover Square, Apr. 2026), which follows dual timelines. In one, present-day NYU student Lee Turner, who may have killed his roommate, flees to his father’s new house in rural Japan; in the other, a young samurai named Sen evades imperial soldiers at the same house in 1877. They intersect when Lee sees a samurai out of his window and Sen sees a foreigner out of hers.
“The windows and doors are an important part of the story,” Baker says. “Not all of the doors open to where you would expect them to, and the windows don’t always remain as windows.” Lee and Sen communicate across centuries via windows that vanish and reappear, and through closet doors that function as portals.
“There was typically less furniture in Japanese houses than in Western houses of the same period,” Baker notes. “That forces you to pay more attention to subtle changes and what things do stand out in a room. The emptiness of that sort of house helped me home in on a few scary elements in the story.”
A boarding school in 1928 Sussex, England, is the centerpiece of Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran (Doubleday, Mar. 2026). Two rival students at the secluded Briarley School for Girls team up to solve the mysterious death of their classmate, and it soon becomes clear that something supernatural is afoot. Curran describes Sussex as “a pretty pleasant place,” in contrast to the “oppressive weather” and “gloomy landscape” of books like Jane Eyre. But like the other locales discussed in this piece, it’s not without its terrors.
“The relative comfort of the characters’ lives is almost entirely dependent on a global system of exploitative commerce, of the slave trade and of colonization,” Curran says. “It felt correct to me that those things would manifest themselves in Briarley; I wanted to have them externalized into the characters’ world. Horror is a good way of getting to do that—specifically gothic horror, which is always about secrets revealed.”
Elyse Martin, a writer in Portland, Maine, is the author of the forthcoming graphic novel Copy Cat (HarperAlley, 2026) and has also published in Electric Literature and elsewhere.
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