Our most recent non-fiction, that I again co-authored with Andrea Janes, founder of Boroughs of the Dead, AMERICA'S MOST GOTHIC: HAUNTED HISTORY STRANGER THAN FICTION, released last fall via Kensington Books / Penguin Random House, and was an Instant USA Today Bestseller and was also nominated for a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction, just like our first non-fiction examination of ghost lore, A HAUNTED HISTORY OF INVISIBLE WOMEN: TRUE STORIES OF AMERICA'S GHOSTS!
These two are perfect books for spooky season, available wherever books are sold!
About AMERICA'S MOST GOTHIC: HAUNTED HISTORY STRANGER THAN FICTION
An Instant USA Today Bestseller and Bram Stoker Award Finalist!
From the Bram Stoker nominated author team who penned A Haunted History of Invisible Women, the first book of its kind to investigate gothic tropes that define American lore. Here is the hidden, dark history of what frightens us – and why.
The Gothic. Brooding, atmospheric, chilling, and not always the outpouring of a feverish imagination. Reality can be even stranger as borne out in this lush and ghostly look at real people who lived–and died—amidst the trappings of the Gothic.
Fog clinging to an isolated mansion. A dangerous patriarch or an overbearing matron. Locked doors and forbidden rooms. Whispers of murder and madness. And a woman shadowed by omnipresent threats. You’ve guessed it. You’ve stumbled into a Gothic tale, and it will haunt you like a ghost.
We often think of the enduring tropes of the Gothic in terms of fiction and film—breath-catching escapes that tap into our fears, anxieties, forbidden desires, and unsettling dreams. But what if some of these chilly vibes are rooted in the experiences of real and tragic people who danced a macabre waltz with love and death? That’s why we’re here. Take the case of teenage Mercy Brown, victim—or was it predator?—of Rhode Island’s vampire hysteria of the 1890s. Marguerite de la Roque, a French noblewoman condemned for “sexual crimes” to Canada’s long-lost Isle of Demons. What happened to her and the barren landscape itself is the stuff of legend. And “Mad Lucy” Ludwell, the decidedly peculiar eighteenth-century high-society hauteur driven mad in the Virginia estate she prowls to this day. President Helen Peabody’s spirit still stringently watches over her Women’s College, now part of Ohio’s Miami University. Ghosts of workers lost in horrific conditions while building the Hoosac Tunnel warn of imminent danger. Settle in. There are more.
Welcome to the phantom ships, haunted academic halls, menacing landscapes, and family curses of America’s Most Gothic—a tour of true spectral sightings and disordered minds. But beware: it’s sure to get under your skin. The haunted—and haunting—figures herein want it that way.
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