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I'm interested in exploring the 'New Zealand gothic' in literature. What do you recommend?

Gothic literature takes a different form in New Zealand than it does in European literary traditions, as we lack the abandoned castles, the drooping Spanish moss, the ruined abbeys and centuries-old restless spirits which form the atmospheric staples of the genre.

Colonial gothic writing in New Zealand rather problematically tended to appropriate indigenous supernatural traditions, representing Māori culture as both primitive and threatening. Later writers, instead of featuring the supernatural, have tended to focus on extreme psychological states, on unease and foreboding, on violence and horror.

· Janet Frame’s traumatic experience as a citizen of “the crazy world” inside the forbidding Gothic buildings of Seacliff Mental Hospital are the inspiration for her novel Faces in the Water.

· The ghosts of Seacliff also walk the pages of Bronwyn Bannister’s Haunt, a story of psychiatric disorder, a long friendship, fairytales and secrets.

· Described as “hallucinatory” is Scarecrow, by Ronald Hugh Morrieson, in which chook-rustlers and a sex killer bring fear to a small New Zealand town, as seen through the eyes of an adolescent boy.

· Terrible happenings occur in an abandoned meatworks in Calliope Bay in David Ballantyne’s 1968 thriller Sydney Bridge Upside Down, in which Harry Baird tries to save his pretty cousin Caroline from the attentions of Mr Wiggins the butcher.

· Saturated in an ever-present miasma of impending tragedy, Kirsty Gunn’s novella Rain tells the story of Janey, at the mercy of a very dark adult world, and her failure to protect her younger brother.

· In the children’s classic Fire Raiser, by Maurice Gee, as WWI breaks out in Europe four children hunt a dangerous arsonist, whose madness has roots which lie deep in the past. For adults, In My Father’s Den also uncovers a family tragedy from the past to explain the violence of the present.

· Elizabeth Knox solves the problem of a lack of local Gothic tropes and landmarks by setting her vampire novel, Daylight, in the sunlight of the Mediterranean and the shadows of Europe’s long and secret history.

· The Redemption of Elsdon Bird, by Noel Virtue, is a study of intense psychological states and the tragic acts which arise from them, in a story about a family isolated within a rigid world of religious fundamentalism.

· Featuring the supernatural, the grotesque, and murder with a theatrical flair is Photo Finish, by Ngaio Marsh, in which an opera singer is found stabbed through the heart with a photo of herself impaled on the dagger.