Things that brought me delight in June, 2026.
I enjoyed Johanna van Veen's haunting novel My Darling Dreadful Thing, but I really enjoyed Bone of My Bone. Bone of My Bone centers on a Catholic nun and a Protestant peasant girl who are carting around the skull of a saint that wants to be reunited with its body, but a necromancer and his mercenary thrall are in hot pursuit across the bloody landscape of the Thirty Years' War. The novel is fast moving, grim when it needs to be, but with its eye on the possibility of redemption. Fans of Christopher Buehlman's Between Two Fires and Robert Eggers's films should lap this up. Highly recommended; it's one of the best things I've read this year.
It's kind of crazy that Evanescence dropped one of their best, most cohesive albums in June, 2026. There's a level of refinement here that comes with experience, but at the same time there is also a passionate fire to these tracks that you don't often get with a band commanding this much popularity and longevity. It's certainly welcome to hear, that's for sure. Sanctuary is plenty heavy, and Amy Lee still knows her way around a piano ballad.
I also got into Synthesis, an album in which Evanescence revisits past glories via new orchestral and electronic versions.
I could have sworn that When Nothing Remains had called it a day and broken up, but if so they got back together and released a new album that I only just heard about in June. Though not as well known as My Dying Bride or Draconian, When Nothing Remains toils in the same funereal garden of doom metal. The riffs are slow and heavy, the vocals veer between death growls and clean singing, and melancholy piano elements add a certain gravitas to the proceedings. The spoken word bits on Echoes of Eternal Night won't be to everyone's taste, but overall I thought this was a great slab of dark storytelling from practiced hands in the melodic death doom genre.
The second season of Devil May Cry isn't perfect; it's often hard to discern what anyone's actual scheme is, and the show relies way too much on flashbacks. That said, when it hits it really hits. And it really hits when some awful anthemic nu-metal song kicks in right before a big action sequence. That's the stuff right there. Apparently we're getting one last season of this--which feels about right to me. Kudos to the team for not wearing out their welcome on this absolutely ridiculous animated series.
For some reason, I thought Agnes, We're Not Murderers! was going to be a bit more like Victorian Psycho, which I loved. Instead, I found something entirely different to love instead. Agnes, We're Not Murderers! is a Gothic novel made from the interconnected raw material drawn from some of the Gothic's foundational texts. Astute readers will note the borrowings from Northanger Abbey, Wieland, Frankenstein, and Carmilla. But more than that--there's an intertextual element here, with footnotes and phrases bolded in red ink to act as both a roadmap through the complexities of this short book and to tell a different, but related, story as a counterpoint to the main tale.
As proof of the absolute abundance we live in, consider that it's still possible to find a band you've never heard and then discover that they have an entire discography of treasures to explore. Such was the case for me with Cloak, whose albums The Venomous Depths, The Burning Dawn, and Black Flames Eternal I delved into in June. Cloak deal in Gothic black metal; they offer a wide sonic palette, working in eerie passages, all-out tremolo assaults, and some straight-ahead riff fests too. If you are as unfamiliar as I was, their work is definitely worth spending some time with.
I enjoyed Natasha Kermani's Abraham's Boys, though I thought it was a little slow and perhaps based on a short story that didn't have enough meat on its bones for a full-fledged movie. The Dreadful is similarly slow moving, but the atmosphere of manic fear it exudes is pretty potent. In The Dreadful, a woman lives with her mother-in-law during the Wars of the Roses; both await his return from the war. When his childhood best friend mysteriously returns instead, and the woman realizes that her mother-in-law is up to some bloodthirsty stuff, things begin to spiral out of control--and then a nightmarish knight shows up.
Summoned to visit her dying gangster father, a pious child finds herself menaced by an imperious vampiress with a thirst for children. Although it's never really explained--and little in this movie is--there is a war going on between two factions of vampires, too. There is a dreamlike quality to Lemora that makes for a compelling experience. In my opinion, Lemora would make an excellent double feature with Valerie and Her Week of Wonders as both of them focus on pubescent women learning to navigate the desires of all the potentially predatory adults around them.
This is a very fun little Gothic novella. In Cynthia Gomez's Muneca, the protagonist takes a job as the caretaker to a non-communicative, paralyzed woman she believes is actually afflicted by a witch's hex. By inserting herself into the household, she's putting herself in grave danger--and positioning herself so that she must confront the dark history of her own family, as well as her identity as a lesbian woman. This one has some really tense sequences, an interesting main character, and--okay, the doll stuff! The blurb on the cover is right about the doll stuff--that brings a nice dose of unique weirdness into play.
We were talking about the band The Foreshadowing (terrible name, I know) on the Tales of the Grotesque and Dungeonesque Discord, and one of my pals mentioned How Like a Winter, an older band fronted by The Foreshadowing's singer. That set me on the path of checking out How Like a Winter, a band from the mid-1990s specializing in Gothic doom metal. Their record is refreshing in its rawness--remember when not everything had to polished? The beauty is in the imperfections.
The Sentinel is a movie I've been meaning to watch for a long time, and I finally got the chance to sit down with it in June. In The Sentinel, a young model moves into a brownstone apartment and meets a pack of "quirky" neighbors who quickly prove to be far more sinister than they first appear. The cast is absolutely stacked with great performers, even in the minor roles, and the film makes extremely effective use of red herrings. I wasn't entirely sure how all the narrative pieces fit together until the end, but when the climax came it felt entirely earned.
I badly needed a palate cleanser after a particularly inept novel experience toward the end of the month, and I found my solace in Ghosts and Robbers: An Anthology of German Gothic Fiction. This anthology is full of classic stuff: a man elopes with a spectral nun, diabolic wishes (via a bottle imp!) grant you get more than you bargained for, being dared to spend the night in a haunted chamber should always be answered in the negative, etc. All that, plus one of the first vampire stories to be committed to prose! You really can't go wrong with this collection if, like me, you're addicted to cruising the dark entries of obscure Gothic fiction.
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