Shannon Scott reflects on foreclosing nostalgia while living in unhinged times
In a January 2026 blog post, Helena Esser observed that neo-Victorian fiction is becoming increasingly “unhinged,” reflecting “that we live in unhinged times.” As an American woman teaching horror film & literature at universities in Minneapolis/St. Paul, I agree that we are living in unhinged times. During Operation Metro Surge, I handed out whistles to my students in case ICE agents tried to kidnap them on campus. That same semester we also had an active shooter lockdown, where I placed a plastic trashcan in front of the classroom door, fished pepper spray out of my purse, and carried on with the lesson. Which is all to say that watching and reading horror feels normal while living in unhinged times.
Esser also notes that neo-Victorian fiction seems to be veering away from a cozy gothic aesthetic into some pretty hardcore horror content: “… might their interest in extreme appetites, surreal concepts, and visceral violence also be a way of foreclosing, even mocking, any spark of nostalgia?” I think the short answer is yes. Neo-nineteenth century horror is not a nostalgic subgenre, particularly outside Victorian England, where rose-tinted glasses are promptly replaced by blood-splattered goggles. Many creators working in this subgenre purposefully avoid creating a sense of the “good old days.” Mary Harron, director of American Psycho, directed the series, Alias Grace, adapted from Margaret Atwood’s novel based on the true story of Grace Marks, who was accused and convicted of killing her employer in nineteenth-century Ontario. Harron approached the series adaptation wanting to create what she called “an anti-Downton Abbey” (Ostad). It worked. There’s nothing sentimental about the series (ditto Atwood’s brilliant novel), which is unsparing and grim in its portrayal of the society Grace Marks lived in—as a domestic servant, a woman, an immigrant, and a criminal.
So, why are horror writers turning to the nineteenth century as a setting for horror when the present offers such an ample buffet of horrific options? Not escapism if the past is depicted as worse than the present. Comfort? Possibly, studies have shown that watching/reading horror has therapeutic benefits. Answers? Probably. These days, we’re all looking for those—as in, how the hell did we end up here? And history is a big part of that equation. Rebellion? Absolutely. When the US president orders signs put up outside the Smithsonian Museum claiming the historical information inside is “inaccurate”—lies created by people who do not love their country—refusing to forget the past (or refusing to view it in a solely positive light) becomes an act of rebellion against the unhinged present.
Here are some recent neo-ninteenth century horror novels with nothing nostalgic between their covers...
This House Will Feed (2026), by Maria Tureaud
Maria Tureaud’s This House Will Feed (2026) is set during An Gorta Mór or the Great Hunger in Ireland. While the novel incorporates elements of folk horror, a bean draíochta dorcha (dark sorceress) and Caillach (a pre-Christian goddess), the real horror is in the depiction of the famine, which nearly halved Ireland’s population. In the Author’s Note, Tureaud writes that the Great Hunger “was the purposeful and intentional starvation of a people that the British Empire had long tried to bring to heel. It was genocide” (Tureaud 339). Readers learn that England continued to export food from a starving Ireland and turned down aid offered by other countries.
Each chapter begins with a quote about the famine from British politicians and economists to Irish poets to abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who toured Ireland at the beginning of the famine. While the novel’s agenda is primarily to educate readers, Tureaud balances historical information with a tragic account of the O’Shaughnessy family, who are thrown off their land in the middle of the famine after their daughter Maggie and the landowner’s vapid nepo baby son have an affair that results in pregnancy. The family’s homelessness and subsequent starvation are the most effective “real life” horror content.
The supernatural horror element occurs when Maggie leaves the workhouse with Lady Catherine for Gortacarnaun, a place where a dark deal has been made to protect the village from famine. Lady Catherine’s estate, and its sordid history, are solidly gothic, and Maggie, whose heart jolts or flutters perhaps too many times, is a gothic heroine. As often happens in neo-nineteenth century horror, the plot hinges on revenge. Although Maggie’s curse is satisfyingly bloody, it would have been even more satisfying carried out on a larger scale. For example, Tureaud quotes the Duke of Cambridge in an Agricultural Society meeting in January 1846: “All knew that Irishmen could live upon anything and there was plenty grass in the field though the potato crop should fail” (Tureaud 194). Yup, that guy. Generally, wealthy people who tell starving people to eat grass (Andrew Jackson Myrick to the starving Dakota Tribe before the US-Dakota War of 1862) or cake (possibly Queen Marie-Antoinette to the starving French before the 1789 Revolution) fare badly. As a horror fan, I wanted to see that revenge IMAX size—the gorier the better.
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025), by Stephen Graham Jones
Stephen Graham Jones’s The Buffalo Hunter Hunter (2025) is an epistolary novel in the vein of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) as well as an historical horror novel that looks at the Marias Massacre in 1870 when US troops killed nearly two hundred unarmed women, children, and elders of the Blackfeet Nation. The frame narrative, set in 2012, features Etsy Beaucarne, a professor hungry for tenure who discovers her great-great-great grandfather’s (Arthur Beaucarne) journal. Arthur, a Lutheran minister, uses his journal to record the “confession” of Good Stab, a Blackfeet Indian (and vampire) who shows up in the church one day dressed in black clergy robes and dark glasses.
Yes, this is a story of revenge—for massacres, removal and relocation campaigns, starvation, broken treaties, and, most relevant to this novel, the mass killing of buffalo. In the nineteenth century, buffalo hunters took the hides of buffalo and left behind the skinned “humps,” lacing the carcasses with strychnine and nearly bringing the buffalo to extinction. These hunters become the targets of our vampiric protagonist who claims, “What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had” (Graham Jones 163).
The novel is relentlessly violent, with the carnage almost beautifully rendered. The denouement inside a church is a sanguinary reckoning as a former soldier attempts to justify his role in the Massacre: “… these were different times, with a different breed of men—the kind necessary to forge a new land, a better country, one that made use of its resources rather than letting them lie fallow” (Graham Jones 303). I won’t tell you how that scene ends, but it’s not with apologies and a handshake.
At a Q & A I attended for the novel at the Open Book in Minneapolis, Graham Jones said, “American history is horror.” Between America’s history of slavery and genocide of indigenous people, he’s not wrong. His advice for the audience articulates what the neo-nineteenth century subgenre can offer: “Take away America’s best weapon: forgetting.”
Victorian Psycho (2025), by Virginia Feito
Virginia Feito’s Victorian Psycho (2025) features Winifred Notty arriving at Ensor House to work for the Pound family as a governess. Winifred is a psychopath on a mission—and it’s not to teach the little tots, Druscilla and Andrew, their geography lessons. The novel ruthlessly satirizes the wealthy and elite, providing readers with scenes of extravagant butchery, with mainly aristocratic blood spilled. The plot takes as much inspiration from horror cinema as from Victorian gothic literature, which readers can tell from the title that Feito says is “a wink to American Psycho” (Feito, Interview, Barnes & Noble). As with Patrick Bateman in Bret
Easton Ellis’s novel, we are solidly inside Winifred’s unreliable and delightfully deranged mind for the entire ride.
Victorian Psycho is a slasher. Winifred’s victims are generally unlikeable and we’re basically waiting to see how she’ll kill them. We get just enough of an origin story to understand why Winifred Notty is so “naughty,” but not so much as to become tedious. (And yes, revenge is a motive again.) As in Halloween (Carpenter 1978) or Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper 1974), the law is not helpful, the location is remote, the body count is high, and the kills are elaborate: the final killing spree at Ensor House on Christmas involves cleavers and arrows and a really, really sharp brooch. Victorian Psycho even offers readers a final girl in the scullery maid.
Victorian Psycho never waxes nostalgic about the Victorian era. Feito claims, “… it felt distantly cozy in a way, until you mature and realize there was no ibuprofen, or tampons, or rights. Then it becomes incredibly terrifying” (Feito, Interview, MPR). While conducting research for Victorian Psycho, Feito experienced what I’m going call “anachronistic rage,” which happens when you immerse yourself in the systemic injustices of another era in the midst of your own unhinged one. She says, “And when I was investigating the Victorian era, I kept coming across these insane sorts of stories of abuse and misogyny and cruelty. […] servants were not in a great position to fend for themselves… The children weren’t doing great either, working really long hours at the factories. There were, like, infanticide epidemics. When I was doing the reading and research, I just kept getting increasingly angry.” (Feito, Interview, MPR). That anger fuels Ensor house’s transformation from a gothic manor to a yuletide slaughterhouse.
The upcoming film adaptation (September 2026) starring Maika Monroe looks appropriately gory with blood spraying across a lace bodice. The trailer uses anachronistic music to set the tone—Texas punk band Die Spitz’s “Throw Yourself to the Sword”—with lead singer Ana Schrobilgen screaming, “Throw yourself/ To the sword/ Take what’s mine/ I take two times more… What’s it like knowing/ None of you bitches can compete?” And what bitch would try to compete with Winifred Notty? Not this one!
She Made Herself a Monster (2026), by Anna Kovatcheva
Anna Kovatcheva’s She Made Herself a Monster (2026) is set in nineteenth century Bulgaria and features a vampire slayer, Yana, but no actual vampires. Instead, there are several women that could be called “witches.” Basically, women providing healthcare to other women. In case you haven’t heard, witches are having a moment. Amy Madigan won the Oscar for her scary-as-hell performance in Weapons (Cregger 2025) and Wunmi Mosaku, who played a good witch/root worker in Sinners (Coogler 2025), was up for an Oscar in the same category. Overall, it seems like a good time to learn a lot about herbs and fast as vaccines and birth control become fugitive in the US..
Although Kovatcheva’s novel is set in the nineteenth century, contemporary readers will find compelling parallels to the present as Anka and Nina slink away to the midwife/witch in the dark of night. In Koprivci, women are valued for their fertility. To protect themselves, the women must work outside the law, which is never on their side. And yes, revenge is a driving force for the novel’s defensive magic and protective poisoning. It’s a dark fairy tale of obsession and power, where the women characters ultimately decide not to escape or “play dead.”
The structure of the novel is unique, including three interludes with Baba Yaga, a witch who lives is a house that walks around on chicken’s legs and is surrounded by a fence made of human skulls. Her witchy wisdom can be found in all the major events of the novel: a marriage, a harrowing birth scene, a fire, two queer love stories, and a murder. I’ll admit that after a certain scene of blood sacrifice, I actually put the novel aside for a time, which is a testament to Kavatcheva’s writing and to my squeamishness. But I eventually returned, lured by the siren song of revenge and compelled to know what happened to the terrifying Captain, a narcissistic bully with lots of power and little self-control. I was not disappointed.
Burn Down Master's House (2026), by Clay Cane
Clay Cane, the author of two previous books of nonfiction, began Burn Down Master’s House (2026) twenty years ago. The historical horror novel features characters connected through the same plantation, Magnolia Row, which is burned to the ground in a revolt in the opening chapter. That initial fire becomes an act of resistance with a ripple effect in each subsequent chapter.
Cane bases his protagonists on real historical figures, then reimagines aspects of their lives. As with much nineteenth century abolitionist literature, Cane’s twenty-first century novel has an agenda that he reveals in the Introduction:
“Misinformation is an old, strong tool; it distorts history, manipulates narratives, and fuels power” (Cane vii). Cane persuasively argues that there is “power in retelling stories of liberation” and that “remembering is an act of brilliant opposition” (Cane viii). Burn Down Master’s House emphasizes the importance of knowing history as a means of resisting current injustices and oppression.
The first chapter follows Luke and Henri, two slaves who become lovers, united in their desire for freedom. Their love story is tenderly depicted, something fragile surrounded by brutality. In contrast, the Ragland family, who own Henri and Luke, are so theatrically parodied, I laughed out loud. Here’s Mistress Kitty talking to her son: “‘Shut up!’ she snapped. ‘It’s hot, and I need a drink. Ruby, get me some brandy!’” (Cane 21). Meanwhile, Mr. Ragland yells at his foppish son, “‘You smell like a French whore,’ with his son retorting, ‘It’s Jasmine!’” (Cane 22). They are truly repugnant people that readers will enjoy seeing killed. All the Southern slaveowners are similarly awful, ugly on the inside and outside, and all succumb to gruesome, protracted death scenes via axes, poison, fire, nails, flaming pokers, dismemberment, etc.
I found the third chapter “Charity” especially moving. Charity Butler used the Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 to obtain her freedom from John Delaplaine (Norman Bruce in the novel), a plantation owner in Maryland. Butler added up the days of every trip she made to Pennsylvania because if an enslaved person resided in the free state of Pennsylvania for six months, they would be free. However, Delaplaine challenged her freedom in court, with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling against her, so that Butler was forced to return to Maryland as a slave, along with her two daughters that were born in Pennsylvania. In the novel, Cane reimagines a new ending for Charity Butler that frees her from the plantation in Maryland. A mercy for her and for readers, but not for Norman Bruce, who dies a most dastardly death!
Neo-Victorian fiction offers a revisioning of the past, giving voice to those not always heard or listened to in that era, like Charity Butler, but neo-nineteenth century horror fiction offers not only a voice but fangs and a cleaver.
References
Cane, Clay. Introduction. Burn Down Master’s House. New York: Dafina Books, 2026: vii-xii.
Esser, Helena. “Is Neo-Victorian Fiction Getting More Unhinged?” The VPFA Blog. January 15, 2026.
Graham Jones, Stephen. Buffalo Hunter Hunter. Saga Press, 2025.
Graham Jones, Stephen. “Question & Answer: The Bufalo Hunter Hunter.” Open Book. Minneapolis, March 21, 2025.
Feito, Virginia. Interview with Ayesha Rascoe. NPR News. February 2, 2025.
Feito, Virginia. Interview with Isabelle McConville. B&N Reads, February 4, 2025.
Ostad, Katrina. “‘Alias Grace’: Twenty Years in the Making, but on TV at the Right Time.” New York Times, October 29, 2017: 1.