Books Like Rachel Hawkins: 8 Atmospheric Gothic Thrillers

What draws me to atmospheric gothic thrillers is the same thing that makes me love to travel: total immersion. The good ones take their time building the world until you can feel the damp in the walls and hear the wind, and suddenly you’re not on your couch anymore — you’re THERE, somewhere far away and a little bit dangerous. That’s the escapism I crave. I get so sucked into the world that I forget whatever’s stressing me out, and I usually end up dreaming about it. (If it’s a scary one, yes, those are nightmares.)

Which is exactly why Rachel Hawkins is at the top of my list. She’s made a whole career out of this one specific feeling: a noir Jane Eyre dropped into the modern South, six travelers stranded on a remote island where people turn up dead, a crumbling old-money estate stuffed with secrets. Those are exactly the kinds of places I want to disappear into — atmospheric, isolated, and humming with the sense that everyone is hiding something. So if you’re after books like Rachel Hawkins, here are eight atmospheric gothic thrillers to get lost in.

Why we can’t stop reading atmospheric gothic thrillers

Gothic suspense is the oldest trick in the scary-book playbook, and it still works because it scares you with a place instead of a body count. The blood is optional; the dread is the point. You take a house, an island, a school, a town: somewhere isolated, a little decayed, cut off from help. Then you let the setting scare the reader for you. Long before anyone gets hurt, you already feel that the walls know something you don’t. That slow, creeping unease is what Rachel Hawkins builds a book around, and she does it better than almost anyone working now.

What makes the modern versions so addictive is that they pair that old gothic mood with a sharp contemporary hook: an influencer’s perfect life, a true-crime podcast, a smart woman who notices the thing nobody else will say out loud. The result is escapism with teeth. You get the transporting, somewhere-else feeling of a great vacation, plus the delicious low-grade fear that someone in this beautiful, faraway place is not who they say they are. I grew up summering on a barrier island that turned eerie the second the crowds left, so I have a soft spot for any book that understands a setting can be the most dangerous character in the room. It’s the same quality that makes these work as spooky season books — they land hardest once the light starts going early.

How I Picked These Books

I weighted three things. First, the setting has to behave like a character: an isolated, atmospheric place that presses in on everyone and shapes what happens. Second, there has to be a real secret rotting underneath: an old death, a family lie, a town that’s decided to look the other way. Third, it has to deliver as a thriller and not only as a mood. I read a frankly embarrassing number of these (they’re my comfort genre) and I have a low tolerance for a creepy house with nothing buried in the basement. Here’s what made the cut.

The 8 best atmospheric gothic thrillers like Rachel Hawkins

1. The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James

In 1982, Viv Delaney took a night-shift job at the Sun Down Motel in Fell, New York, and vanished without a trace. In 2017, her niece Carly comes looking for answers and ends up working the same front desk — where the lights still flicker, the smell of cigarettes drifts through empty halls, and the dead don’t seem entirely gone. For readers who want a ghost story and a cold-case thriller braided into one.

Simone St. James is the reigning queen of the atmospheric-with-actual-ghosts thriller, and this is her most propulsive. The dingy roadside motel is pure gothic, a neon-lit nowhere where something terrible happened and never left, and the dual timeline means you’re piecing together two haunted women at once. It’s the closest thing on this list to curling up inside a really good campfire story.

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2. The Storm Reaper by Kristen Van Nest

The Storm Reaper is set on Fire Island, a barrier island that empties out the second the season ends until it’s just you, the wind, and a handful of year-round locals who have known each other a little too long. A hurricane is always coming. And the island has its own folklore — a ghost who appears before a storm, with the old rule that if you see him you leave, because anyone who stays dies in the surge. Setting as menace, weather as a clock, a legend that may or may not be covering for something worse: that’s gothic to the bone.

The book opens with two girls nearly drowning before a storm, and you can read the first few chapters free to see where it goes from there. Local folklore says a ghost appears before a hurricane: see him and leave and you live, stay and you die in the storm. A serial killer has spent a decade building his method around that legend — kill during the storm, let the tide carry the body out, let the police rule every disappearance a weather accident. It worked, until the currents shifted and the bodies started washing back.

Patrol officer Violet Crisp, who lives on a boat with an opinionated orange cat named Purrmaid and a corkboard full of dead people, is the only one who sees the pattern, and a town this small has buried a lot of secrets to protect the one thing it has, which is the off-season quiet. If you love a setting that feels like its own character, isolated and weather-haunted and humming with things nobody will say out loud, this one’s for you. Fun fact: the book is based on real American folklore — the Gray Man legend of Pawleys Island, South Carolina, where a ghost appears before hurricanes to warn the living. Full disclosure: I wrote this one.

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3. The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware

Hal is a broke young woman scraping by reading tarot on the Brighton pier when she receives a letter informing her she’s inherited part of a stranger’s estate. She knows it’s a mistake (wrong family) but she’s desperate, so she travels to the crumbling, cliff-top Cornish house to bluff her way through the funeral, and finds a household with far darker secrets than she bargained for. For readers who want a modern Rebecca with a con artist at the center.

Ruth Ware writes the most reliably gothic thrillers working today, and this is her chilliest: a decaying manor called Trepassen, a sinister housekeeper straight out of du Maurier, magpies on the lawn, and a family rotting behind good manners. The dread builds the way cold seeps into a stone house — slowly, and then all at once. It’s the perfect pick if Hawkins’s old-money-secrets register is what you’re chasing.

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4. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield

Vida Winter is England’s most beloved and most secretive novelist, and she’s spent a lifetime telling interviewers a different lie about her past. Now she’s dying, and she summons a quiet bookshop biographer named Margaret to finally record the truth: a story of an isolated estate called Angelfield, feral twins, a governess, a ruinous fire, and a secret that warps everything you thought you understood. For readers who want the lush, bookish, old-fashioned gothic in its purest form.

If you want the line that connects straight back to Hawkins’s Wife Upstairs, it’s this one: The Thirteenth Tale is steeped in the same Jane Eyre, all crumbling houses and madwomen and the past clawing its way into the present. It’s slower and more atmospheric than the thrillers around it on this list, and that’s the point — it’s the one you read by candlelight in one greedy sitting.

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5. The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon

In 1908, in the frozen town of West Hall, Vermont, a grieving mother named Sara loses her daughter and does something unforgivable to get her back. More than a century later, a teenage girl named Ruthie wakes to find her own mother gone and stumbles onto Sara’s hidden diary — and the local legend of the “sleepers,” the dead who can be called back for exactly seven days. For readers who want their gothic with real cold, real grief, and a genuine supernatural chill.

Jennifer McMahon owns the New England gothic, and this is her eeriest. The snowed-in town, the woods full of stories, the diary unspooling a hundred-year-old horror — it’s atmosphere turned all the way up. What makes it land is how far a mother will go, in any century, to undo a loss. The sleepers are the least of it. Read it under a blanket.

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Hooked on the cold, cut-off setting? My books set in New England list is full of small towns with long memories and longer winters.

6. The Lake of Dead Languages by Carol Goodman

Jane Hudson returns to teach Latin at the Heart Lake School for Girls, the remote Adirondack boarding school where, twenty years earlier, three of her classmates drowned in the icy lake. She tells herself she’s come home for a fresh start — and then a girl’s journal surfaces, old secrets resurface with it, and the deaths begin to repeat. For readers who want dark-academia gothic with a lake that keeps what it takes.

Carol Goodman writes the most elegant version of the isolated-school thriller, thick with classical myth, frozen water, and the particular cruelty of teenage girls. The Adirondack setting is half the menace, cut off and beautiful and very cold, and the past-and-present structure means the lake’s body count never feels finished. If the gated-community claustrophobia of The Wife Upstairs worked on you, the campus version will too.

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7. Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

When Maggie Holt was five, her family fled Baneberry Hall in the middle of the night, and her father turned their three weeks there into House of Horrors, a wildly famous haunted-house memoir Maggie has never believed a word of. Now her father is dead, the Victorian estate is hers, and she goes back to renovate it and prove the whole thing was made up — except the house has other ideas. For readers who want a haunted-house story that’s also a sly mystery about who’s lying.

Riley Sager builds the book in alternating chapters, Maggie’s present-day renovation against the actual text of her father’s “true” memoir, so you’re never sure whether you’re reading a ghost story or a con. The crumbling Vermont mansion is gothic to its bones, and the question of whether the supernatural is real or staged is exactly the tightrope Hawkins loves to walk. Genuinely creepy, genuinely twisty.

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8. The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton

In 1913, a little girl is found alone on an Australian wharf with nothing but a suitcase and a book of fairy tales. Decades later, her granddaughter Cassandra inherits a forgotten cottage in Cornwall and sets out to untangle who the child really was — a search that winds back to a grand estate, a walled garden, and a family that buried its truths as carefully as its dead. For readers who want a sweeping, secret-soaked gothic you can completely disappear into.

A note on this one: it’s the gentlest pick on the list. Kate Morton writes lush, dual-timeline family sagas more than white-knuckle thrillers, so the dread here is a slow ache rather than a jump scare. I’m including it anyway because no one transports you like Morton (the Cornish cliffs, the overgrown garden, the century of secrets) and if it’s the immersion you’re after more than the fear, this is the one you sink into for a whole weekend.

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What makes a great atmospheric gothic thriller?

Here’s the part that always makes me feel better about my reading habits: loving this stuff might actually be good for you. During the early pandemic, researchers found that horror fans and “morbidly curious” people were measurably more psychologically resilient than everyone else — better at coping, less wrecked by the uncertainty. The theory is that scary, immersive fiction is basically a flight simulator for fear: you practice dread in a place where nothing can actually hurt you, and you come out a little steadier. So when I say I read gothic thrillers to relax, I have science on my side now.

And the reason these particular books do that so well comes down to place. A gothic thriller hands you a setting that can’t be reasoned with, a snowed-in town or a barrier island or a house with a bad history, and lets the isolation press in until every ordinary thing feels loaded. You can’t just leave. Help is far away. The weather is closing in. The engine is the slow understanding that you are somewhere beautiful and you are not safe.

Then add the secret. The best of these books understand that a creepy place is only half of it — underneath there has to be a buried truth that the people in charge would rather protect than face. A drowned classmate. A faked memoir. A town that decided long ago to call a murder an accident. That’s the part that turns atmosphere into a thriller, and it’s the part I tried hardest to honor when I wrote my own.

What to read next

If the cut-off settings are your thing, my island thriller books roundup is full of places you can’t easily escape, and survival thriller books covers the nature-is-the-villain end of the shelf.

And if you want one more for the stack, The Storm Reaper is mine — the books like Rachel Hawkins pick where the gothic setting is a Fire Island that turns lethal the moment the season ends, and the secret the whole town is hiding has a body count.

FAQ

What are the best books like Rachel Hawkins?

Some of the best books like Rachel Hawkins are The Sun Down Motel by Simone St. James (a haunted motel cold case), The Death of Mrs. Westaway by Ruth Ware (a crumbling Cornish estate full of secrets), Home Before Dark by Riley Sager (a haunted-house memoir that may be a lie), and The Winter People by Jennifer McMahon (a New England town where the dead come back). For a gothic island thriller in the same lane, my own The Storm Reaper is set on Fire Island, where a killer hides inside a local storm legend.

What is gothic suspense, exactly?

Gothic suspense is a thriller where the setting and mood do most of the scaring. The hallmarks are an isolated or decaying place (an old mansion, a remote island, a snowed-in town), dark secrets buried in a family or community, the past reaching into the present, and usually a woman piecing together a danger everyone else is ignoring. Think dread and atmosphere over gore. Rachel Hawkins, Ruth Ware, and Simone St. James are leading modern names in the genre.

Which Rachel Hawkins book should I read first?

Most readers start with The Wife Upstairs, her breakout, a modern Southern noir retelling of Jane Eyre set in a gated Alabama community. From there, Reckless Girls (six travelers stranded on a remote island) and The Heiress (an old-money North Carolina estate and a notorious heiress) are the natural next steps. If you finish her backlist and want the same isolated-setting-with-secrets feeling, the gothic thrillers on this list, including my Fire Island thriller The Storm Reaper — pick up right where she leaves off.

Are there gothic thrillers set on an island?

Yes — the isolated island is a gothic favorite because it strands everyone together with nowhere to run. Rachel Hawkins’s Reckless Girls is set on a remote Pacific island, and my own The Storm Reaper is set on Fire Island, the barrier island off Long Island, New York, where a serial killer uses hurricane season and a local ghost legend as cover. For more, see my island thriller books roundup.

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