When we last put Horror under the microscope in November 2025, we found that sales were up 6% during the third quarter of that year compared with the previous year. Almost a year later, with Halloween approaching, we’re returning to the darker corners of the Canadian book market. This time, we’re taking a closer look at Gothic fiction.
Gothic literature has a long history of famous classics like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. All three have received renewed attention through recent screen adaptations. If you’re interested in the impact Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein had on sales of Shelley’s Gothic classic, check out our post on the 2026 Oscars effect.
With contemporary authors continuing to revisit and reinterpret the genre’s familiar conventions, we were curious: Is Gothic fiction experiencing the same growth as Horror?
What makes a book Gothic?
Although Gothic fiction frequently overlaps with Horror, the two are not always interchangeable. Gothic fiction is associated with the supernatural, but its defining elements extend beyond ghosts and monsters and the source of a Gothic story’s unease is often entirely human.
Guides to Gothic literature and the Gothic novel typically identify them by their atmospheric settings; crumbling castles, vast and isolating landscapes, and dark forests are familiar features of the genre. They often feature narratives of psychological tension with dark family secrets and morally grey characters stricken with obsession, guilt, or grief.
The Book Industry Study Group’s BISAC classification also identifies Fiction / Gothic as a separate subject from Fiction / Horror.
With this distinction in mind, we turned to SalesData & LibraryData to investigate if books categorized with the Gothic BISAC code have seen the same growth as Horror titles in the Canadian print book market in 2026, compared to 2025, and to find out what kinds of dark tales have been capturing readers’ attention.
Buying Fiction / Gothic
What did we find? Gothic fiction is on the rise!
During the third quarter of 2026, Canadian sales of Fiction / Gothic titles increased by 45% over the same period in 2025. When looking at the same period, sales across all subjects increased 3% year over year and Fiction sales increased 6%, confirming the substantial growth to Gothic fiction.
This increase was not limited to a single month in Q3 2026. Gothic sales grew year over year in July, August, and September when comparing corresponding months between 2025 and 2026. The sustained increase suggests that there might be a broader interest beyond a spike for seasonal spooky reading. While Gothic still accounts for a small portion of fiction sales, its growth suggests that Canadian book buyers are increasingly interested in titles classified in the genre.
Borrowing Fiction / Gothic
Gothic fiction isn’t just seeing growth in Canadian bookstores. Our LibraryData reports also show year-over-year increase of 8% in library circulation across Canada during the third quarter of 2026. This was slightly below the 11% increase in Fiction loans overall and the 17% increase across all library subjects.
Looking at monthly borrowing trends, Gothic library loans increased year over year in all three months of Q3 2026. July saw the largest percent change at 13%, followed by August at 10% and September at 2%.
Gothic titles saw a more substantial increase in renewals, which rose 42% year over year. For comparison, renewals increased 18% across Fiction and 28% across all subjects.
The largest monthly increase in Gothic renewals occurred in July, when renewals rose nearly 90% compared with July 2025.
Overlap with Horror?
As Gothic sits so close to horror, we took a look at Horror subcategories to see which of those have been the most popular recently.
The largest percent increase came in the Horror / Slasher category, with sales growing 1,311% from the third quarter of 2025 to the third quarter of 2026. Notably, the largest increase in actual units sold was in Horror / Occult & Supernatural, representing a 340% increase from the third quarter of 2025 to the third quarter of 2026. Growth in this subgenre specifically aligns with trends in the readership towards gothic and supernatural themes.
Reading Fiction / Gothic
Here are the top selling and top borrowed Gothic titles from the third quarter of 2026.
Top selling
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran
- The Fourth Princess by Janie Chang 🍁
- The Cannibal by I.V. Ophelia
- The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
Top borrowed
- Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
- The Fourth Princess by Janie Chang 🍁
- The Children by Melissa Albert
- The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia 🍁
- Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
Together, the sales and borrowing data show that Gothic fiction has been finding more readers, although there is a slight difference between the two markets in that library data shows more interest in the classics, while sales data has a larger variety of new and classic titles, possibly representing wider availability of the classics in libraries. There is no doubt however that there is a hunger for stories with a Gothic slant amongst Canadian readers.
