Chin-Sun Lee is the author of the debut novel Upcountry (2023) and a contributor to the New York Times bestselling anthology Women in Clothes (2014).
Her work has also appeared in Electric Literature, Literary Hub, The Georgia Review, and Joyland, among other publications. She lives in New Orleans.
At Shepherd Lee tagged five favorite gothic novels about distressed women. One title on the list:
Rosemary's Baby by Ira LevinRead about the other entries on the list.
Most people are familiar with the movie, and I was, too, before I read the novel—which is shockingly good! Though published in 1967,the prose is modern and restrained.
Rosemary is betrayed by those she trusts, most heinously by her opportunistic husband, but she’s no passive victim; instead, she becomes ferocious. I give props to Levin for channeling the burgeoning feminist rage of the times, which he also did in his 1972 classic, The Stepford Wives. The dream/hallucination scene where Satan impregnates Rosemary and her confrontation with Guy the morning after is so well-written and horrific it made me want to stab him with a pitchfork.
Rosemary's Baby is among Lisa Unger's five top horror novels that explore the darkest corners of our minds, Alice Blanchard's ten chilling thrillers to get you through a winter storm, Ania Ahlborn's ten scariest books of all time, Jeff Somers's twenty-one books that will give you an idea of how the horror genre has evolved and "twenty-five books that might not necessarily be the best horror novels, but are certainly the scariest," Christopher Shultz's top ten literary chillers, and Kat Rosenfield's top seven scary autumnal stories.
--Marshal Zeringue
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