Gothic

A spoiler-free review of The Knave and the Moon by Rachel Gillig: a five-event tournament, a knight with no memory, a gargoyle who steals the book, and a duology close that trades one grief away too cheaply.

Eight students spend the summer of 1993 emptying a Victorian house in the woods. Its owner lived there alone for sixty years and filled fifty rooms floor to ceiling, leaving two narrow crawl-channels through the rubbish. He also left a book of poetry, and the poetry is a lock.

A broke actress takes a job watching a rich man's son for ten thousand dollars a month. He is kept locked in a room, sedated, and something else is living inside him. Olivie Blake's Los Angeles horror novel is furious and funny and about three structural tricks too many.

Her fiance dies of an aneurysm shaped like tentacles, and his family invites her to their island for four days to celebrate his life. Hannah Whitten leaves romantasy for cosmic horror, and the scariest thing in the book is how kind everyone is.

There is a particular spell certain children's books cast on a reader. You return to them as an adult and the spine cracks like...