What to read after watching Wuthering Heights

Okay, listen...When Alison Willmore said the new Wuthering Heights movie was "brave enough to just be about two incredibly messy bitches who can't stay away from one another" she wasn't wrong.

Just for the moment, we're not going to dive into all the intricacies and ethics of adaptation. For the moment, we're going to have a good time simply wading into the shallow depths of this sexy and stupid movie. I don't want to hear anything about our girl Emily Brontë rolling in her grave. The truth is, yeah she'd probably be pissed and confused, especially about Heathcliff's miscasting as a white man. 

I also think she'd be thrilled just to see the shear success her novel has achieved— something she didn't get to witness in her lifetime. In our bookshop alone, so many more people have been buying and reading the original text since the movie was announced. 

So, whether you're looking for more like Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights, or you're sitting this one out (valid), but would still like to expand your gothic reading horizons, check out the below book recommendations. We haven't included Wuthering Heights itself on this list, just because we feel that goes without saying!

If you want more...Spooky Mansions

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

After receiving a frantic letter from her newlywed cousin begging for someone to save her from a mysterious doom, socialite Noemí Taboada heads to High Place, a distant house in the Mexican countryside. She's not sure what she will find - her cousin's husband, a handsome Englishman, is a stranger, and Noemí knows little about the region.

Noemí is more suited for cocktail parties than amateur sleuthing. But she's also tough and smart, with an indomitable will, and she is not afraid: not of her cousin's new alluring, menacing husband; not of his father; and not even of the house itself, which begins to invade Noemi's dreams with dark visions. For there are many secrets behind the walls of High Place.

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Alone in the world, Eleanor is delighted to take up Dr Montague's invitation to spend a summer in the mysterious Hill House. Joining them are Theodora, an artistic 'sensitive', and Luke, heir to the house. But what begins as a light-hearted experiment is swiftly proven to be a trip into their darkest nightmares, and an investigation that one of their number may not survive.

Twice filmed as The Haunting, and the inspiration for a 10-part Netflix series, The Haunting of Hill House is a powerful work of slow-burning psychological horror.

Model Home by Rivers Solomon

Two bodies lie in the garden of a sprawling property in Oak Creek Estate, a wealthy gated community in Dallas, Texas.

The bodies belong to the parents of Ezri, Eve and Emmanuel, who have long since abandoned the childhood home in which their parents remained all these years. A home that has haunted and hollowed them throughout their lives, in a neighbourhood where they grew up as the only Black family, hoping to survive a place that wanted to claim them, expel them and ruin them all at once.

In the wake of their parents’ death, Ezri and their siblings are forced to confront the reasons they left, the nightmares that have held them captive and the possibility that realities exist beyond those that have forged them.

She is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran

Jade Nguyen has always lied to fit in. She’s straight enough, Vietnamese enough, American enough – at least for this summer with her estranged father in Vietnam.

Just five weeks of ignoring the quietly decaying French colonial house he's fixing up, then college and freedom are hers. But soon Jade begins waking up every morning certain that something has clawed down her throat...from the inside. Then the ghost of a beautiful bride visits her with a cryptic warning: DON’T EAT.

When her father and little sister don't believe her, Jade decides to scare them into leaving by staging some haunting events of her own. She recruits Florence, the daughter of her dad's business associate (and more of a distraction than Jade bargained for) to help. But the house has other plans. It's hungry.

If you want more...Gothic Erotica ('Gothica' if you will)

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

London 1862. Sue Trinder, orphaned at birth, grows up among petty thieves - fingersmiths - under the rough but loving care of Mrs Sucksby and her 'family'.

But from the moment Sue draws breath, her fate is linked to that of another orphan growing up in a gloomy mansion not too many miles away...

Delta of Venus by Anais Nin

As influential and revelatory in its day as Fifty Shades of Grey is now, Anais Nin's Delta of Venus is a groundbreaking anthology of erotic short stories, published in Penguin Modern Classics.

In Delta of Venus Anais Nin conjures up a glittering cascade of sexual encounters. Creating her own 'language of the senses', she explores an area that was previously the domain of male writers and brings to it her own unique perceptions. Her vibrant and impassioned prose evokes the essence of female sexuality in a world where only love has meaning.

Priest by Sierra Simone 

He's a priest, and here is his confession. There are many rules a priest can't break.
A priest cannot marry. A priest cannot abandon his flock. A priest cannot forsake his God.

Tyler Bell has had no problem playing by the rules for the last three years after a family tragedy set him on the path to priesthood. That all changes when the delicious, sultry voice of Poppy Danforth sinks its claws in him through the screen of his confessional booth, and he can't get her sins out of his head. It should be easy to put his impure thoughts of her to rest, considering the vows Tyler has taken.

It should be nothing to overcome what the sight and sound of her does to him, when his life with the Church means everything. But once he has his first forbidden taste of those red lips, Tyler can't help but break all his rules for Poppy-no matter what it might cost them both.

The Poetry of Sex ed. by Sophie Hannah

Romance and poetry seem to go hand in hand but - implicit, explicit, nuanced or starkly frank - sex itself has long been a staple subject for poets. In fact a great deal of erotic poetry rejects the distinction. It's hard to imagine a more fruitful subject for poets than sex, in all its glorious manifestations: from desire and hope, through disappointment and confusion, to conclusion and consequence.

And little has changed over the centuries, as Sophie Hannah's anthology vividly demonstrates, from Catullus pleading with Lesbos to Walt Whitman singing the body electric. Moods and attitudes may vary but the drive persists as does the desire to write about it. Sophie Hannah's selection ranges from ancient Rome to modern New York, from gay to straight, but her principle has been to go low on the sugar and high on the excitement.

If you want more...Obsessed and unhinged protagonists

The Yellow Wall-Paper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

In the throes of a ‘temporary nervous depression’ following childbirth, a woman is brought by her physician husband to recuperate in an isolated New England mansion. 

There she is barred from her work of writing, denied any visits to friends, and encouraged to simply get better. Sequestered in the old nursery at the top of the house, with barred windows and a bed nailed to the floor, she has little to do but examine the strange wallpaper that surrounds her – and appears to shift before her very eyes.

This is the tale of a woman driven to the brink and beyond. Here accompanied by Gilman’s key wider stories, The Yellow Wallpaper endures as a groundbreaking, deeply disturbing classic of feminist horror.

This Immaculate Body by Emma Van Straaten 

Alice has been cleaning Tom's flat every Wednesday for a year.

With every smudge wiped from his coffee cup, every crease smoothed out in his bed, every multivitamin counted from the jar, Alice spirals deeper into infatuation. But as Alice prepares for the moment when they will finally meet face-to-face, she discovers that love might not be the cure she thought it was.

As Alice frantically tries to cling to an imagined future with Tom, the line between fantasy and reality become ever more blurred, putting everything she has dreamed of at risk. 

This Immaculate Body is a story of obsession, of the way women view the world and the ways that the world views them.

Acts of Desperation by Megan Nolan 

She's twenty-three and in love with love. He's older, and the most beautiful man she's ever seen. The affair is quickly consuming.

But this relationship is unpredictable, and behind his perfect looks is a mean streak. She's intent on winning him over, but neither is living up to the other's ideals. He keeps emailing his thin, glamorous ex, and she's starting to give in to secret, shameful cravings of her own.

The search for a fix is frantic, and taking a dangerous turn...We're all looking to get what we want – but do we know what we need?

Eyes Guts Throat Bones by Moira Fowley 

The belly-groan of a face unpeeled. A break-up poem recited knee-deep in bog water. An ancient burial mound rising and falling like a chest. The ghost of Stephen Gately reading the ingredients on a ham and cheese sandwich.

Startling, sinister and irresistibly joyful, Moira Fowley's debut collection unravels all of our darkest impulses and deepest fears.

If you want more... Classic Gothic

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

'The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.'

Passionate, poetic and revolutionary, Jane Eyre is a novel of naked emotional power.It's story of a defiant, fiercely intelligent woman who refuses to accept her appointed place in society - and instead finds love on her own terms - has become famous as one of the greatest romances ever written, but it is also a brooding Gothic mystery, a profound depiction of character and a transformative work of the imagination. 

Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier

Working as a lady's companion, the heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Life begins to look very bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise.

She accepts, but whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to the ominous and brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory of his dead wife Rebecca is forever kept alive by the forbidding Mrs Danvers.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Discover Toni Morrison's most iconic work in this Pulitzer-prize winning novel that exemplifies her powerful and important place in contemporary American literature.

It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her love.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

A twisted, upside-down creation myth, Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale lays bare the dark side of science, and the horror within us all.

It tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, who plunders graveyards to create a new being from the bodies of the dead – but whose botched creature causes nothing but murder and destruction. Written after a nightmare when its author was only eighteen, Frankenstein gave birth to the modern science fiction novel.