Gothic fiction

Salt's Gothic list draws on the genre's oldest preoccupations – confinement, inheritance, the double, the uncanny object – and gives them a contemporary, literary treatment.

Alice Thompson's novels (Justine, The Falconer, Burnt Island, The Existential Detective, and the forthcoming The Book Collector) form the backbone of the list, alongside Padrika Tarrant's fable-like Broken Things and The Knife Drawer, and Wyl Menmuir's and V. H. Leslie's water-haunted fiction. These are stories that trust atmosphere over shock, and the slow accumulation of dread over the jump scare.