Books by Patrick McGrath
“Patrick McGrath is a champion of Gothic fiction who I feel is grievously under-recognised by modern genre writers. We should be talking about his work a lot more than we do. Spider, which was made into a film by David Cronenberg several years ago, is about a man who has just come to live in a halfway house after being released from a psychiatric hospital. This is 1950s London. The house is situated relatively close to where he grew up as a child. He hears conversations and noises and strange sounds around him, but we’re never always certain they’re attached to the people he can see. Through his own writings, we come to understand what really happened with his brutal father and his protective mother, all as his interior architecture falls apart (an echo of Poe’s Usher). This is much more psychological Gothic horror fiction than the previous examples. There are no real ghosts here, no malevolent forces. This is about the deterioration of a human brain.” Read more...
Nathan Ballingrud, Novelist
Interviews where books by Patrick McGrath were recommended
The Best Gothic Horror Books, recommended by Nathan Ballingrud
Gothic horror allows us to talk about psychological horror and repression while having a huge amount of fun, explains author Nathan Ballingrud. He talks us through his top five choices, from haunted houses to smoggy London to the swamps of Alabama, and considers the chilling parts of ourselves and our societies that they bring to light.
