It’s a lurid, luscious debauch of a book. Henderson’s world-building has something of the grotesque novelty of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, tinged red by a Clive Barker-esque blending of blood and sex. Of course, in true gothic style, Marion sets out to hunt down the secrets of the house … and finds surprisingly horrible things. There, Marion serves as bloodmaid to The Countess, a relationship as erotic as it is exploitative. It begins in a steampunk city-state before heading north – aboard a blood-fuelled train, no less – to a Great House ripped straight from central European history. Bonus points are awarded for plumbing the full occult potential of Catholic ritual.Īlexis Henderson’s House of Hunger (Bantam £16.99) takes the gothic even further afield. It treads similar ground to other post-colonial gothic revisions of late, but goes above and beyond in the extremity of the demonic events within the house. Isabel Cañas’ historical gothic is set in the aftermath of the Mexican war of independence but riffs on the Brontës’ domestic terrors. The Hacienda (Bantam £20.99) is haunted by more sombre spirits. Soon Teddy’s drawings begin to depict nasty things, offering a parallel narrative of violence and haunting, as well as genuine paper jump-scares. The kid in question, Teddy, loves to draw, and his efforts are reproduced alongside Rekulak’s easy-going prose. Part ghost story, part social-inequality satire, it follows Mallory, who begins a nanny job that is recognisable from every “creepy little kid” movie you’ve ever seen. Jason Rekulak’s Hidden Pictures (Little, Brown £14.99) is a lot more fun. Already pitch dark, the book accrues awful weight in the wake of Covid denial and political lies.

As we peel back the layers of this rotten onion, however, the implications of an alternative truth prove to be more terrible than any undead horde. The initial set-up seems familiar: a zombie outbreak in an anonymous metropolitan city, retold by a survivor. Despite its brevity, Devlin’s post-truth parable is almost too clever to summarise. Meanwhile, Malcolm Devlin’s And Then I Woke Up (St Martin’s Press £10.99) is a narrow nightmare of a novella. All the White Spaces treads in the footprints of Dan Simmons’ The Terror, but it takes its own ice-axe to the fantasies of empire and masculinity that underpin this type of adventure story. What awaits them in Antarctic wastes is far from friendly, but inhuman hostility plays second fiddle to the grim, gruesome toil of life on ship and ice. Wilkes’ doorstopper goes even colder, accompanying a team of southbound polar adventurers in the waning years of the golden age of exploration.

All the White Spaces by Ally Wilkes