Bly Manor Recommended Reading List
As stormy weather rolls through the Pittsburgh region and we lean further into spring, the verdant grounds of Bly Manor come to mind, with all their ghosts, stories, and plot twists that leave us reeling. Though it has been over five months since the release of The Haunting of Bly Manor, why not celebrate the turn of the season and ghosts that will continue to haunt the edges of horror, rain or shine?
The Haunting of Bly Manor, a Netflix Original series created by Mike Flanagan, serves largely as an adaptation of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, an iconic Gothic novel well-known throughout the horror sphere. The show moves beyond James’ original work, however, introducing elements from some of his other fiction, as well as elements created specifically for the show. While there’s a whole conversation to be had about the differences between the source material and Flanagan’s work, The Haunting of Bly Manor serves as the perfect starting point to dive further into Gothic horror, ghost stories, and experimental fiction. Recently, I collaborated with Assistant Professor of English at Lackawanna College Brian Fanelli to create a recommended reading list for those new to Gothic horror and genre veterans looking for something new.
Brian Fanelli recs:
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
Jane Austen isn’t typically associated with Gothic literature, but her early 19th-century novel, published posthumously in 1817, is a spoof of the genre, specifically the works of Ann Radcliffe. This coming-of-age story centers around Catherine Morland, a naïve heroine, struggling to understand the world around her. Like much of Austen’s work, there are social delights typical of the Victorian era. Northanger Abbey also features Austen’s wit and dry humor, this time aimed at the entirety of the Gothic genre. Morland is sure something sinister lurks at Northanger Abbey, the estate belonging to the wealthy Tilney family and the novel’s leading man/Catherine’s suitor, Henry. Northanger Abbey is a must-read for its humor and satire. It also shows the power and influence of Gothic literature at the turn of the 19th century. After all, one of the most esteemed novelists of the era made it the focus of one of her earliest works.
Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
Flannery O’Connor’s short stories are read more than her two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960). It’s likely that a student taking an introduction to literature class or an American literature survey course will at least encounter “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” or maybe “Good Country People,” but O’Connor’s novels, especially Wise Blood, are just as disturbing as the Misfit or the false Bible-salesman Manley Pointer. One motif in O’Connor’s work and Gothic literature in general are characters with a physical or spiritual deformity. In Wise Blood, the protagonist, Hazel Motes, is the perfect example of this. He was discharged from World War II for battle wounds, and as the son of a backwoods preacher, he spends his days trying to disprove religion. At the heart of the novel are themes and motifs recurrent in O’Connor’s work, including an outcast, religion and intense devotion, hypocrisy, and the past’s haunting influence on the present. Read O’Connor’s highly anthologized stories, but read her novels as well. Too often, they are overlooked in favor of her short fiction.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
Mark Z. Danielewski’s debut novel, House of Leaves (2000), isn’t for everyone. It has layers of narration, endless footnotes, and an experimental page layout that challenges how we actually read novels. But at its core, House of Leaves is essentially a Gothic novel about a shapeshifting house that has numerous oddities, including hallways that act as entrapments and rooms that are bigger or smaller than their reported measurements. The first level of narration follows Johnny Truant, a tattoo artist who discovers a manuscript by a man named Zampano. As Johnny digs deeper into the manuscript, the story consumes him, just like the house engulfs the family of Will Davidson, yet another level of narration. House of Leaves is a challenging read, but strip away the experimentation and what you have is a tried and true Gothic story about a house that’s not what it appears to be on the surface—a house with a disturbing history that devours those who stumble upon its story.
Laura Kemmerer recs:
The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories Edited by Tara Moore
Harkening back to the same Victorian-era Christmas ghost story tradition mentioned in The Turn of the Screw, The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories (2016) captures both classic as well as hard-to-find ghost stories for the season, including memorable works such as Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Old Nurse’s Story”, Walter Scott’s “The Tapestried Chamber”, and many others. Though a reader may be inclined to save these stories for the most wonderful time of the year, these thrills and chills from the 1800s reflect the spirit of James’ work and the era in which it was written. There is something unique about reading an older style of writing and hearing the wails of these ghosts from the pens of authors that no longer walk among the living.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020) truly lives up to its name, with the lone house in the countryside, a frightening family, and a family saga that continues to haunt the present. Mexican Gothic is also among an emerging corpus of works that does the important work of expanding the boundaries of genre, inviting much-needed newer perspectives to the table. In this instance, Moreno-Garcia’s novel incorporates critical discussion of race, colonialism, and the horrifying consequences of both. The beauty of Moreno-Garcia’s writing, paired with Noemí Taboada, a well-realized protagonist, makes for an atmospheric reading experience that is both emotionally magnetic and personally challenging, two of the marks of what makes a great Gothic novel. As a genre-fluid author, Moreno-Garcia’s voice ignites new lights in the sprawling, crumbling manor that is Gothic horror.
Help the Witch by Tom Cox
More along the lines of experimental fiction, Help the Witch (2018) by Tom Cox, through a collection of short pieces, voyages into the transitional spaces that skirts familiar and strange country alike. Cox’s book begins with the story of a man who is himself in a transitional space having recently broken up with his girlfriend and moved into a new home, furnished with its own chorus of half-heard voices. Help the Witch goes on to feature emotional and experiential narrative snapshots of houses, a swimming hole where something ancient walks once the local teenagers are back in school, and many other pieces of experimental fiction that capture the ghostly nature of what sleeps beneath, the lost byways of history, and what even continues to haunt us in our sense of the present. Though Help the Witch could be argued to be a collection of ghost stories, these are not what you would expect from the name alone. Remote and beautiful in all the right ways, Tom Cox’s collection of short stories focuses more on the emotional experience of the Gothic, rather than horror itself.
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Article written in collaboration by Brian fanelli & Laura Kemmerer
Laura Kemmerer tuned into horror with an interest in what these movies and books can tell us about ourselves and what societies fear. She is most interested in horror focused around the supernatural, folklore, the occult, Gothic themes, haunted media, landscape as a character, and hauntology (focusing on lost or broken futures).
Brian Fanelli fell in love with the horror genre when he was a kid and watched Night of the Living Dead with his dad. He is the author of two books of poems, All That Remains and Waiting for the Dead to Speak, winner of the Devil's Kitchen Poetry Prize. Brian has an M.F.A. from Wilkes University and a Ph.D. from Binghamton University. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of English at Lackawanna College.
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