Gothic fantasy is often described as a subgenre of horror, dark fantasy, or the paranormal—really, though, it touches on all of these fiction styles. If you’d like to sample its spooky thrills, here are three gothic fantasy ebooks we recommend.

 From the Teeth of Angels by Jonathan Carroll.

Four strangers’ lives are turned upside down when death comes for a visit.

At first it seems like an ordinary dream. Talkative Englishman Ian McGann meets a long-dead acquaintance and asks him questions about the afterlife. But when he awakes, a thick pink scar stretches across his chest. Each subsequent night, as he dreams of death, he asks more questions, understands less, and awakens with increasingly gruesome injuries. When he meets an American traveler in Sardinia and tells him of his experience, the stranger begins having matching dreams—with the same painful results. Across the globe, a former TV icon struggles with leukemia, and a movie star falls in love with an HIV-positive photographer. All are flirting with death, and the more they struggle to understand the mysteries of the afterlife, the more they realize the world is not nearly as simple as they once believed.

[image error] Swan Song by Robert R. McCammon

McCammon’s epic, bestselling novel about a girl psychic struggling to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. 

Something flashes in nine-year-old Swan’s brain, telling her that trouble is coming. Maybe it’s her mother, fed up with her current boyfriend and ready to abandon their dismal trailer park and seek a new home. But something far worse is on the horizon. Death falls from the sky—nuclear bombs which annihilate American civilization. Though Swan survives the blast, this young psychic’s war is just beginning.

As the survivors try to make new lives in the wasteland, an evil army forms, intent on murdering all those tainted with the diseases brought by fallout. When Swan finds a mysterious amulet that could hold the key to humankind’s salvation, she draws the attention of a man more dangerous than any nuclear bomb. To rescue mankind, this little girl will have to grow up fast.

 Winterlong by Elizabeth Hand

This dynamite debut novel takes readers on a sensual dystopian journey through a world unburdened by moral taboos.

Set in the surreal, post-apocalyptic City of Trees, Winterlong centers on Wendy Wanders, a girl who can tap into the dreams and emotions of the people around her, and her long-lost twin brother, Raphael, a seductive sacred courtesan to the City’s decadent elite. During their voyage, they encounter manmade and godlike monstrosities—both hideous and gorgeous—in their effort to stop an ancient power from consuming all. Blending science fiction and fantasy, Winterlong is a dark fairy tale about a land where societal and sexual taboos have disappeared, and what’s left is a world that is both lyrical and terrifying, familiar and striking.