America's Most Gothic Haunted History: Stranger Than Fiction

Overall Rating: 2.5/5

Going in, I expected tales of the strange and the unknown. The spine-tingling, and the mysterious. And Leanna Renee Hieber and Andrea Janes do an absolutely spectacular job on delving into the gothic side of things and speaking up to this book's name, but when you place haunted history on your cover... you are no doubt to draw a crowd more interested in the paranormal...

America's Most Gothic Haunted History: Stranger Than Fiction is extremely well-written for the book that it is. It is creepy, it is dark, and it is a veritable treasure trove of tales of women who lived, experienced, and died by frequent gothic tropes that we encounter in fictional books - those of tragic heroines, doomed romances, lingering spirits... Hieber and Janes bring those tales back to life with a fresh wave of emotions, and of being able to feel that lingering dread through these macabre tales in a masterful collaboration that may keep you up wondering what that noise is in the middle of the night...

If you are interested in paranormal history and an explanation of the tales surrounding them... or more interested in ghosts, this is not the book for you. This book often takes long cuts into exploring the more literary elements and often doubling back to fact-check those against real-world history... which I found somewhat confusing and had to double back multiple-times to reread sections for comprehension. This also somewhat needs to be edited in some places so that it flows better and provides better understanding instead of seemingly switching topics out of the blue. I learned a lot, and this book will definitely find its place among people looking for more logical takes on this subject but for me... the "haunted" part of the title does not particularly line up with what is actually contained within...

This is still a very extensively researched and well-written nonfiction as a whole but was not exactly my desired cup of tea.