The Gothic Novel is a type of Romantic fiction that predominated in English literature in the last third of the 18th century and the first two decades of the 19th, the setting for which was usually a ruined Gothic castle or abbey. The Gothic novel, or romance, emphasized mystery and horror and was filled with ghost-haunted rooms, underground passages, and secret stairways. The principal writers of the English Gothic romance were Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto (1764); Clara Reeve, who wrote The Champion of Virtue (1777); Ann Radcliffe, with The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794); Matthew Gregory Lewis, with Ambrosio, or the Monk (1795); Charles Robert Maturin, who wrote The Fatal Revenge (1807); and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein (1818). Charles Brockden Brown, the first American professional novelist, is best known for his Gothic romances. The genre was one phase of the Romantic Movement in English literature and was also the forerunner of the modern mystery novel. The term Gothic is used to designate narrative prose or poetry of which the principal elements are violence, horror, and the supernatural.
Gothic fiction (sometimes referred to as Gothic horror) is a genre of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. The effect of Gothic fiction depends on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literacy pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel. Melodrama and parody (including self-parody) were other long-standing features of the Gothic.
Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, secrets, and hereditary curses.
The stock characters of Gothic fiction include tyrants, villains, bandits, maniacs, Byronic heroes, persecuted maidens, femmes fatales, madwomen, magicians, vampires, werewolves, monsters, demons, angel, fallen angel, the beauty and the beast, revenants, ghosts, perambulating skeletons, the Wandering Jew, and the Devil himself.

Historical Bibliography of Gothic Fiction
The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole
Vathek, an Arabian Tale (1786) by William Thomas Beckford
The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe
Caleb Williams (1794) by William Godwin
The Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis
The Castle Spectre (1797) by Matthew Gregory Lewis
The Italian (1797) by Ann Radcliffe
Clermont (1798) by Regina Maria Roche
Wieland (1798) by Charles Brockden Brown
The Children of the Abbey (1800) by Regina Maria Roche
The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1805) by Jan Potocki
Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley
Northanger Abbey (1818) by Jane Austen
The Vampyre; a Tale (1819) by John William Polidori
Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) by Charles Maturin
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) by Thomas de Quincey
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) by James Hogg
The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827) by Jane Webb Loudon
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) by Victor Hugo
Young Goodman Brown (1835) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Minister's Black Veil (1836) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe
The Phantom Ship (1839) by Frederick Marryat
The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by Edgar Allan Poe
The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) by Edgar Allan Poe
The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall (1844) by George Lippard
Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë
Villette (1850) by Charlotte Brontë
The House of the Seven Gables (1851) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Cranford (1851) Elizabeth Gaskell
Gothic Tales (1850-1859) by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Mummy's Foot (1863) by Théophile Gautier
The Dead Secret (1871) by Wilkie Collins
Carmilla (1872) by Sheridan Le Fanu
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) by Oscar Wilde
The Horla (1887) by Guy de Maupassant
The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker
The Turn of the Screw (1898) by Henry James
The Monkey's Paw (1902) by W. W. Jacobs
The Phantom of the Opera (1910) by Gaston Leroux
The Lair of the White Worm (1911) by Bram Stoker
Rebecca (1938) by Daphne du Maurier
The Iron Gates (1945) by Margaret Millar
Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) by Truman Capote
The Lottery and Others (1951) by Shirley Jackson
Gormenghast (1946–1959) by Mervyn Peake
The Haunting of Hill House (1959) by Shirley Jackson
We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1963) by Shirley Jackson
The Unicorn (1963) by Iris Murdoch
Rosemary's Baby (1967) by Ira Levin
Expensive People (1968) by Joyce Carol Oates
Last Summer (1968) by Evan Hunter
Don't Look Now (1970) by Daphne du Maurier
The Stepford Wives (1972) by Ira Levin
Triad (1973) by Mary Leader
22 Hallowfield (1974) by Doris Shannon
Salem's Lot (1975) by Stephen King
Julia (1975) by Peter Straub
The House Next Door (1976) by Anne Rivers Siddons
Interview with the vampire (1976) by Anne Rice
The Shining (1977) by Stephen King
The Hour of the Oxrun Dead (1977) by Charles L. Grant
Ghost Story (1979) by Peter Straub
Clara Reeve (1979) by Thomas M. Disch
Bellefleur (1980) by Joyce Carol Oates
The Land of Laughs (1980) by Jonathan Carroll
The Nameless (1981) by Ramsey Campbell
The Elementals (1981) by Michael McDowell
The Woman in Black (1983) by Susan Hill
Familiar Spirit (1983) by Lisa Tuttle
The Place (1986) by T. M. Wright
Bones of the Moon (1988) by Jonathan Carroll
The Secret History (1992) by Donna Tartt
Elephantasm (1993) by Tanith Lee
A spell of winter (1995) by Helen Dunmore
Already Dead: a California gothic (1997) by Denis Johnson
My Heart Laid Bare (1998) by Joyce Carol Oates
The Inheritance (1998) by Tom Savage
Martha Peake: a novel of the revolution (2000) by Patrick McGrath
The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Rose Red (2002) by Ridley Pearson and Stephen King
The Little Friend (2002) by Donna Tartt
Prairie Gothic (2003) by J.M. Hayes
A Christmas gambol (2004) by Joan Smith
Sleep, pale sister (2004) by Joanne Harris
The Ghost Writer (2004) by John Harwood T
he Shadow of the wind (2004) by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Minotaur (2005) by Barbara Vine
The Historian (2005) by Elizabeth Kostova
Lord Byron’s novel: The evening land (2005) by John Crowley
The Italian secretary : a further adventure of Sherlock Holmes (2005) by Caleb Carr
Four and Twenty blackbirds (2005) by Cherie Priest
Candles Burning (2006) by Tabitha King & Michael McDowell
The Thirteenth tale (2006) by Diane Setterfield
The Keep (2006) Jennifer Egan
The prefect man (2006) by Naeem Murr
Heart-Shaped Box (2007) by Joe Hill
Ghostwalk (novel) (2007) by Rebecca Stott
Darling Jim (2009) by Christian Moerk