During the cozy fall season, it’s second nature for me to pick up and read books in the horror, dark academia, and fantasy genres. It’s the perfect weather to curl up inside the house and lose yourself in a good book.
Since it’s still summer, I wanted to create a list of books set in coastal locations that have a gloomy, gothic atmosphere. It’s the perfect blend of the end of summer and the beginning of the colder months.
I hope you enjoy these book recommendations! x
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
When Leah returns after a catastrophic deep-sea mission, Miri is overjoyed to have her wife back. But almost immediately, Miri realizes something is different. Whatever happened aboard the vessel, whatever they were meant to be studying before they became trapped on the ocean floor, Leah has brought something back with her—and it has followed her into their home.
As Miri tries to hold on to the routines of their old life, it becomes increasingly clear that nothing is the same. Leah is still physically beside her, but the woman Miri loves seems to be slowly slipping away, replaced by something she can neither understand nor stop.
Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward
In a secluded cottage overlooking Maine’s coast, Wilder Harlow sits down to write the final book of his life. It is a story about a childhood summer spent with his closest friends, a killer who terrorized their small New England town, and the body they discovered—an event whose horror has haunted them for decades.
It is also the story of Sky, Wilder’s former best friend, who stole his unfinished memoir and transformed it into a sensational bestseller called Looking Glass Sound.
But as Wilder begins to write, the lines between memory and fiction blur. Strange details surface, old memories become unreliable, and Wilder finds cryptic notes hidden throughout the cottage, each written in Sky’s unmistakable green ink.
The Only One Left by Riley Sager
In 1929, the brutal Hope family murders send shockwaves through the Maine coast. Seventeen-year-old Lenora Hope is widely believed to have killed her entire family, but the police never managed to prove it. Lenora has always denied the crime—and since that bloody night, she has never spoken publicly, left Hope’s End, or revealed what really happened inside the cliffside mansion.
Decades later, in 1983, home-health aide Kit McDeere arrives at the crumbling Hope’s End to care for Lenora after her previous nurse abruptly disappears. Now in her seventies and confined to a wheelchair, Lenora has lost her ability to speak after a series of strokes. Her only means of communication is an old typewriter.
Then, one night, Lenora types five words that change everything: I want to tell you everything.
As Kit helps Lenora piece together the events surrounding the Hope family massacre, long-buried secrets begin to surface. But the more Lenora reveals, the more questions arise. And when Kit uncovers disturbing details about the nurse who came before her, she begins to wonder whether Lenora is telling her the whole truth.
Because if Lenora didn’t commit the murders, someone else did. And the woman Kit thought was helpless may be far more dangerous than she ever imagined.
Habits of the Sea by Shea Ernshaw
The night Clay Lockhart’s wife dies, a violent storm tears their home away from the Scottish coast, sending it adrift into the Atlantic. Thirty years later, twelve-year-old Ellie Mills discovers the floating island off the coast of Nova Scotia. At its center stands a weather-beaten farmhouse, where Clay is still waiting.
By morning, the island has vanished, leaving Ellie to wonder whether she imagined the whole thing. Decades later, now in her thirties, Ellie sees the island again and returns, determined to uncover the truth. But what she finds defies everything she knows: Clay hasn’t aged a single day.
Faced with the impossible, Ellie must choose between the life she’s built and a love that defies the laws of time and nature
The 19-year-old unnamed narrator of The Seas lives in a claustrophobic seaside community filled with gossip and secrets. She mourns her father, who committed suicide by walking into the ocean. Coping with her grief, she clings to her father’s last words: she’s a mermaid.
She is also in love with a war veteran who is thirteen years her senior. As the lines between sanity and madness begin to blur, her actions eventually land her in jail. However, her escape is otherworldly, leading her to believe that there may be some truth to her father’s words.
The Lighthouse Witches by C.J. Cooke
When single mother Liv is hired to paint a mural inside a century-old lighthouse on a remote Scottish island, she sees it as a chance to give her three daughters—Luna, Sapphire, and Clover—a fresh start. But when two of the girls mysteriously disappear, Liv is plunged into a nightmare.
Beneath the lighthouse lies a cave that once served as a prison for women accused of witchcraft. The islanders warn Liv of wildlings—supernatural creatures said to be created by witches as instruments of revenge, capable of taking the form of human children. And according to local legend, wildlings are dangerous enough to be killed on sight.
Twenty-two years later, Luna has spent her life searching for the mother and sisters who vanished that day. So when she receives a call claiming that her youngest sister, Clover, has been found, she is overjoyed—until she sees her. Clover is exactly as Luna remembers her, still seven years old, the age she was when she disappeared.
Now Luna must confront a terrifying possibility: Clover may not be the sister she remembers at all, but a wildling. With only fragments of memory from her time on the island, Luna returns to uncover what really happened to her family. But the deeper she digs, the more she realizes that the truth may not only change everything she believes about her past—it may change who she is.
A Study in Drowning by Ava Reid
Effy Sayre has been haunted by visions of the Fairy King since childhood, leaving he little choice but to believe in fairy tales. Her beloved copy of Angharad—Emrys Myrddin’s epic about a mortal girl who falls in love with the Fairy King before ultimately destroying him—is the one thing keeping her sane. When Myrddin’s family announces a contest to redesign the late author’s seaside estate, Effy sees it as a chance to fulfill her destiny.
Hiraeth Manor turns out to be a labyrinthine nightmare, and its residents are far from welcoming. Among them is Preston Héloury, a skeptical literature scholar determined to prove that Myrddin was a fraud. As Effy and Preston reluctantly join forces to unravel the mysteries surrounding Myrddin’s legacy, they uncover secrets that blur the line between the magical and the mundane. With dangerous forces closing in from both worlds, the truth they discover could destroy them both.
House of Salt and Sorrows by Erin A. Craig
Annaleigh lives in Highmoor, a manor by the sea, with her sisters and their father and stepmother. After Annaleigh’s four sisters tragically die and each is more devastating than the last—by the plague, a plummeting fall, a drowning, a slippery plunge—many believe the family is cursed by the gods.
Through a series of ghostly visions, Annaleigh suspects her sister’s deaths were no accidents. She finds her sisters sneaking out every night to attend balls, dancing in silk gowns until dawn, and Annaleigh questions who—or what—are they dancing with, and if she should stop or join their mysterious trysts.
Annaleigh meets a mysterious stranger in the process of unraveling the darkness that has fallen over her family. Getting closer to the stranger and finding the answers to the curse, it’s a race against time before the darkness claims her life next.
Thank you so much for reading! I hope one of these books piqued your interest <3
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