Almost every gothic novel that shaped the genre is now in the public domain. That means you can read them free, legally, as e-books from Project Gutenberg, and listen to volunteer-recorded audiobooks from LibriVox. Here is a route through the essentials, roughly in publication order.

The 18th-century originals

Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) started it all: a cursed castle, a giant helmet falling from the sky, and a tyrant desperate to keep his line alive. Ann Radcliffe perfected the form with The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) — terror that turns out to have rational explanations — while Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796) went the other way, into sex, sin and real devils.

The Romantic gothic

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) turned gothic dread toward science. Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) is the great deal-with-the-devil novel. Edgar Allan Poe brought the gothic to the short story.

The Victorian gothic

The second half of the 19th century produced the gothic's most famous monsters — and its most famous queer subtexts. Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872), a vampire story about two young women, predates Dracula by a quarter of a century.

More free gothic fiction

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