The Gothic never dies. It lingers, changing its shape, trading candlelight for screen glow, castles for city apartments, curses for the quiet dread of identity and desire. What began in the echoing halls of the eighteenth century still breathes through our modern stories, reminding us that beauty and ruin often share the same heartbeat.
Every era finds its own ghosts. Mary Shelley’s stitched monster walks beside the engineered children of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, and Brontë’s storm-tossed lovers whisper through the lush, ominous landscapes of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic. Both authors carry the Gothic’s preoccupations into the present, proving that the genre still thrives in stories of identity, power, longing, and the darkness we struggle to name. The settings shift, the language modernizes, but the heartbeat remains the same.
These pairings trace that lineage—thirteen Gothic classics and their modern heirs, bound by mood as much as by theme. The Gothic, after all, has never been only about haunted castles and ghosts. Its spirit survives in stories of obsession, longing, and the shadows that gather beneath ordinary lives, even when the monsters wear modern clothes. Some of these pairings follow that looser lineage, tracing the mood rather than the trope.
🧴And because Eerie Escapes is built on atmosphere, each pairing is matched with a scent—a perfume chosen to echo the mood of its pages.
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1. The Castle of Otranto (Horace Walpole, 1764) × The Ancestor (Danielle Trussoni, 2020)
From cursed castles to buried bloodlines, both stories unearth the Gothic’s oldest inheritance: the terror of family. Walpole’s crumbling fortress births the genre itself, while Trussoni’s modern heroine inherits an ancestral estate that feels more like a warning than a gift. Secrets, power, and the weight of blood haunt every stone.
Perfume pairing: Diptyque – Oud Palao
A dark resinous blend of oud, rose, and vanilla smoke—ancestral, opulent, and a little dangerous.
2. The Mysteries of Udolpho (Ann Radcliffe, 1794) × The Silent Companions (Laura Purcell, 2017)
Radcliffe’s trembling heroines wander candlelit corridors of doubt and desire, forever peering into locked rooms. Purcell revives that same unease in her tale of a decaying estate where painted wooden figures seem to move on their own. In both, reason and terror dance in the half-light, and imagination becomes its own form of haunting.
Perfume pairing: Penhaligon’s – The Bewitching Yasmine
Amber, coffee, and jasmine smoke—an intoxicating veil of mystery and menace.
3. The Monk (Matthew Gregory Lewis, 1796) × A Dowry of Blood (S.T. Gibson, 2021)
Few novels plunge as recklessly into temptation as The Monk, where sanctity curdles into sin and desire burns through every vow. Gibson’s A Dowry of Blood inherits that feverish intensity, trading cloisters for crypts as it explores power, pleasure, and punishment within love’s most dangerous vows. Both shimmer with blasphemy and beauty.
Perfume pairing: Serge Lutens – Ambre Sultan
Amber resin and myrrh swirl with heat and incense, a scent of devotion undone.
4. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, 1818) × Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2005)
Both novels stare into the mirror of human creation and recoil at what looks back. Shelley’s monster and Ishiguro’s quiet clones share the same yearning—to be seen as more than the sum of their parts. The horror here isn’t the creature, but the creator.
Perfume pairing: Maison Margiela Replica – Lazy Sunday Morning
Clean linen and soft musk—beautiful, sterile, and heartbreakingly human.
5. Melmoth the Wanderer (Charles Maturin, 1820) × Melmoth (Sarah Perry, 2018)
Two centuries apart, the same cursed figure walks the earth, collecting the damned. Maturin’s original wanderer tempts souls toward despair, while Perry’s reimagining turns his legend into a meditation on guilt, witness, and human cruelty. Both suggest that hell is not a place below, but the burden of what we cannot forget.
Perfume pairing: Le Labo – Thé Noir 29
Black tea, bergamot, and cedarwood—smoky, restless, and steeped in sorrow.
6. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë, 1847) × Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966)
Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea answers Brontë’s Jane Eyre, giving a voice to the woman locked away in the attic and revealing the story she never got to tell. Read together, the novels show how passion can warp into tragedy, and how reclaiming a forgotten life can become its own kind of liberation.
Perfume pairing: Commodity – Paper Personal
Clean wood and skin musk—a quiet ghost of a scent, intimate and enduring.
7. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë, 1847) × The Essex Serpent (Sarah Perry, 2016)
Both novels are steeped in wild weather and wilder hearts. Brontë’s moors rage with doomed passion, while Perry’s marshlands shimmer with the tension between faith and reason, myth and desire. Each turns landscape into emotion—untamed, consuming, and impossible to fully name.
Perfume pairing: Jo Malone – Wood Sage & Sea Salt
Earth, wind, and salt spray: the scent of freedom, longing, and the ghosts that never quite leave the land.
8. The House of the Seven Gables (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851) × Mexican Gothic (Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 2020)
Both stories peel back the rot beneath family respectability. Hawthorne’s ancestral curse festers in dusty New England rooms, while Moreno-Garcia’s colonial mansion blooms with mold, madness, and monstrous inheritance. Each reveals how guilt seeps into the walls—and how women must confront what history has buried.
Perfume pairing: Tom Ford – Velvet Orchid
Honeyed rum, jasmine, and myrrh: lush, decadent, and faintly poisonous.
9. The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins, 1859) × The Death of Mrs. Westaway (Ruth Ware, 2018)
From spectral women on moonlit roads to sinister inheritances, both novels thrive on deception and dread. Collins’s labyrinth of mistaken identity finds a modern echo in Ware’s gothic suspense, where secrets twist through family fortunes and crumbling estates. The terror isn’t always in the ghost—it’s in the paperwork.
Perfume pairing: Byredo – Gypsy Water
Juniper, lemon, pine, and sandalwood—a wandering, whispering scent that conceals as much as it reveals.
10. Uncle Silas (Sheridan Le Fanu, 1864) × The Invited (Jennifer McMahon, 2019)
Inheritance, isolation, and suspicion bind these two tales together. Le Fanu’s young heroine faces the menace within her own family estate, while McMahon’s modern couple builds a home on haunted ground, unknowingly awakening buried secrets. Both remind us that evil often feels most at home where we should be safest.
Perfume pairing: Maison Margiela Replica – Autumn Vibes
Cedarwood, moss, and cardamom—a crisp breath of fallen leaves and things stirring beneath them.
11. Carmilla (Sheridan Le Fanu, 1872) × Plain Bad Heroines (Emily M. Danforth, 2020)
Le Fanu’s languid vampire glides through a fever dream of intimacy and danger, where love and hunger are indistinguishable. Danforth revives that queer Gothic legacy through a dual-timeline tale of obsession, performance, and forbidden allure. Both blur the line between devotion and doom, inviting readers to surrender to the spell.
Perfume pairing: Juliette Has a Gun – Lady Vengeance
Bulgarian rose, patchouli, and vanilla—seductive, daring, and darkly romantic.
12. Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897) × Certain Dark Things ( Silvia Moreno-Garcia, 2016)
Seduction, hunger, and survival: the eternal triangle. Stoker’s immortal predator becomes Moreno-Garcia’s myth of ancient clans and modern corruption, a story where love is both weapon and wound. Both shimmer with the thrill of surrender and the terror of control.
Perfume pairing: Yves Saint Laurent – Black Opium Eau de Parfum
Sweet coffee and white flowers swirl like midnight silk.
13. The Turn of the Screw (Henry James, 1898) × The Little Stranger (Sarah Waters, 2009)
Both unfold in grand old houses thick with silence, where haunting may be madness and madness may be truth. James traps us inside one woman’s spiraling perception; Waters expands that dread into a postwar class ghost story where grief and guilt linger like smoke. In both, belief itself becomes the most frightening presence of all.
Perfume pairing: Chanel – Les Exclusifs Coromandel
Patchouli, benzoin, and white chocolate—a haunting elegance that clings long after the lights go out.
Closing
The Gothic endures because it knows our fears evolve, but never vanish. Its monsters shift from crypts to consciousness, its ghosts from candlelit corridors to the corners of our own reflection. Whether in windswept moors or city apartments, what these stories share is the ache of being human—haunted by what we desire, and by what we’ve done to get it. So light a candle, open the window to the night, and let the old and new Gothics whisper together across the centuries.
📖 If you enjoyed this story, you’ll love Eerie Escapes — the book that inspired it all. Learn more here.