Bound in Season: Fall/Winter 2025 Reading List for Every Goth Archetype
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Although we are all darkly inclined, some of us haunt boardrooms in full black tailoring while others write poetry at 3 a.m. Whether you’re an Heiress, a Dark Academic, a Brat or a Whimsy Goth, your bookshelf should be as personalized and iconic as your wardrobe.
Here’s your goth-coded Fall/Winter 2025 reading list, handpicked for each archetype—with new and upcoming releases, cult favourites and deep cuts that speak to your specific font of poetic shadow.
The Widow
Vibe: Grief as glamour. Longing. Red wine, black lace.
Grief Is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter – A lyrical, experimental novel of loss that feels like a séance.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë – A gothic confession of love, loss and moral defiance; a governess haunted by the living, not the dead, finds a bittersweet kind of freedom.
The Heiress
Vibe: Old money aesthetic with dark secrets
The Guest by Emma Cline – An unhinged take on privilege, power and how it slips through fingers like pearls.
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton – Scandal and society’s iron grip; an opulent love story about choosing between comfort and the dangerous pull of desire.
The Romantic Goth
Vibe: Ink-stained fingers, typewriters, love letters no one will read.
How to Carry Water by Lucille Clifton – A collection that aches with clarity and feminine strength.
Dracula by Bram Stoker – An atmospheric tale of obsession and longing, where passion bleeds into danger under moonlit Transylvanian skies.
The Corporate Goth
Vibe: CEO of sadness. Dominates meetings in leather.
My Body by Emily Ratajkowski – A razor-sharp, cerebral dive into image and control.
Severance by Ling Ma – a deadpan, eerie satire where a publishing office worker navigates the collapse of society with the same apathy she brought to her cubicle; equal parts corporate dreadgery and apocalypse.
The Brat
Vibe: Soft Dom bait. Pink, but make it poisonous.
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas – Still iconic. Brats everywhere agree.
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos – A razor-sharp misadventure through glitzy, jazz-age decadence proving that wit and charm can be as disarming as beauty.
The Vamp
Vibe: Sensual, decadent, nocturnal.
Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice – Timeless, lush, hungry.
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde – Beauty, sin and the intoxicating pull of eternal youth — the ultimate ode to living deliciously.
The Oracle
Vibe: Moonlight, mystery and messages from beyond.
The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow – A tale of sisterhood and spells with a through-thread of resistance.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley – A cautionary tale of creation and fate — a storm-laced meditation on what happens when knowledge outpaces wisdom.
Siren
Vibe: hypnotic lure and venom by the sea.
The Mermaid and Mrs. Hancock by Imogen Hermes Gowar — In 18th-century London, a courtesan and a merchant’s fateful meeting over a preserved mermaid unleashes a tide of ambition, desire, and danger.
The Odyssey by Homer—The ultimate myth of allure and ruin — sirens sing sailors to their doom, proving beauty can be as deadly as the sea itself.
Whimsy Goth (includes Southern Goth)
Vibe: playful garden party at a 100-year old cemetery.
House of Cotton by Monica Brashears—A young woman in the American South finds herself entangled in a macabre photography business, where beauty, death and survival bloom together.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt—Part true crime, part Southern Gothic love letter to Savannah — dripping with charm and secrets hidden under magnolia trees.
Dark Academic
Vibe: Poe by candlelight.
Babel by R.F. Kuang—In a tower of linguistic magic, scholarship is power — and rebellion brews in the shadows between bookshelves.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt—A tight-knit group of classics students at an elite college spiral into obsession as well as the intoxicating seduction of knowledge.
Pinup
Vibe: magnetic 1940s/50s look taking a scalpel to vintage values.
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus—A brilliant chemist in the 1960s turns TV cooking star, challenging gender norms with unapologetic charisma.
Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann—A decadent, glamorous and tragic ride through fame, love and addiction — all wrapped in couture and lipstick.
To set the mood for your reading ritual, layer your space with little luxuries that invite stillness. With a soft blanket, a gothic mug, a scented bookmark and a candle flickering nearby, the atmosphere shifts.
We hope that these titles inspire you to curate a collection as singular as your own dark soul.
Tell us which you’ll read first.
*** All novel photos courtesy of Amazon.ca ***
