We will, of course, forever cherish the classics of the gothic tradition, from Henry James’s deeply unsettling The Turn of the Screw and Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House to the spectral works of M.R. James, Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, and Daphne du Maurier’s peerless Rebecca.
But ghost stories are not the preserve of Victorians alone. The best of 2025’s crop of chilling tales offers frights that are as psychological as they are spectral. Time, then, to pull an armchair up to a crackling hearth and sink into this latest gathering of candlelit manors and haunted city flats – stories that prove the genre can still reinvent itself, merging gothic atmosphere with that most modern of afflictions: anxiety and unease.
The Decadence by Leon Craig
Leon Craig’s debut The Decadence is a standout for this most haunting of seasons: a queer gothic tale steeped in desire and, as its title alludes, excess. Set in what turns out to be a very, very haunted country house during an illicit lockdown escape, it follows a group of friends whose hedonism awakens something ancient and hungry within its walls. Like the best ghost stories, The Decadence also confronts timely horrors that belong to the living – here, a corrosive lie about money, accepted in silence due to latent British antisemitism. The result is intoxicating, erudite and deeply unsettling. Think The Secret History meets The Haunting of Hill House. Leon Craig is a writer to watch.
We Live Here Now by Sarah Pinborough
From the bestselling author of Behind Her Eyes comes another masterful psychological thriller to read late into the night under torchlight. Pinborough turns her lens on domestic hauntings in We Live Here Now. When a couple moves away from London to the arrestingly beautiful Larkin Lodge in Dartmoor, Emily and her husband Freddie hope to recover after an accident that almost killed her. But things are, but of course, not what they seem. Emily becomes increasingly alarmed by strange, spectral happenings in the house, convinced that it is haunted by the ghost of someone who has been murdered there – though she can find no evidence of such an event. Having recently recovered from sepsis, her senses are somewhat in doubt, at least in Freddie’s mind, as whispers from the house’s tragic past begin to seep into their marriage too. And what, for the love of all that is holy, is the terrifying thing in the room on the third floor? The New York Times calls it ‘atmospheric, immersive, surprising, a master class in twists'.
I Want To Go Home But I’m Already There by Róisín Lanigan
Lanigan’s debut channels the anxiety of modern urban living – or, to put it plainly, the hellscape that is the rental market – into something genuinely eerie. Set in a London flat with far too much history, it’s a story about belonging, displacement and the ghosts we carry inside ourselves. A haunting for the housing-crisis generation, laced with biting satire and social commentary, it captures the bleakest aspects of millennial life with wit and simmering dread in equal measure. As The New Statesman puts it, it’s ‘a document of hellish times and a map of our relationships with others, ourselves, and our demons – metaphorical and literal.’
Scuttler’s Cove by David Barnett
For those who prefer their hauntings windswept and salt-stained, David Barnett’s Scuttler’s Cove delivers coastal folk horror at its best. When Merrin Moon (a name that could scarcely be more gothic if it tried) returns to the fishing village (the eponymous Scuttler’s Cove – another disquieting appellation) where she grew up following her mother’s death, she finds a place transformed – overtaken by second-homers and outsiders. But something ancient and dark is stirring beneath the surface, a secret the locals have been guarding for centuries. As Jane Johnson puts it, this is ‘an eerie tale of folk horror, as old gods and locals with age-old roots come into conflict with new money and the modern world, with a satisfying supernatural showdown, and a twist you won't see coming’.
The Farmhouse by Chelsea Conradt
When a couple retreat from San Francisco to the rural isolation of Nebraska to recover from loss, the move is meant to be a fresh start – a chance to heal in peace. But their failure to ask why the farmhouse was so readily for sale soon comes back to haunt them. Something in the house has begun to feed on their sorrow, and on their sanity. Emily hears her late mother’s favourite music drifting across the cornfields; she glimpses blood in the farmhand’s truck; and the tale of a missing girl – and her mother’s mysterious death – begins to entwine itself with her own. Deeply chilling and breathtakingly cinematic.
