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Haunted Margins

@haunted.margins

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🖤Horror Bookstagram | Reviewer
🥀 Gothic
🪵 Folk
🧌Creatures
🕯️Religious & more!
Curated by @sanyaruggiero |Psychotherapist
💅🏼 @gattina_beauty

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Soooo beyond grateful to have received book mail (and in my Birthday month too🥹)!!

I am way too excited for words because as many of you know by now — there aren’t any book stores where I live! (Fiji) 🫨

Thank you so much to these incredible authors!

🩸 @author_kjell_vidar_aahman_teig : A Battle Against Demons
🩸Alex Grass — @infernaltramps
🩸 @david.scott.hay.official: The Butcher of Nazareth
🩸 @aelangeauthor : Dead Season — A Winter on Mackinac Island

Have you read any of these? 👀

#bookstagram #horrorgram #horrorbooks #booktok #bookstagrammer by @haunted.margins

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3 days ago

There is no land quite like the Emerald Isle — or…Ireland ☘️

This ancient country is the birthplace of Samhain, an ancient 2,000-year-old Gaelic festival that marks the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter, and serves as the true historical root of modern Halloween 🎃

Ancient Celts believed the boundary between the physical world and the Otherworld was at its thinnest during Samhain, allowing spirits, ancestors (aos sí), and faeries to cross over 🧚 🔥 🪵

These books are the perfect gateway to a cozy Celtic Spooky season! 👻

Have you read any of these yet? 👀

🎨 Cover Art: Samhain by John Anster Fitzgerald by @haunted.margins

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4 days ago

Early vampire fiction evolved from 18th-century Gothic poetry into a rich 19th-century tradition of short stories and novels that transformed Eastern European folklore into modern horror 🧛‍♂️🩸

Here, we sink our teeth into ten seminal works of the undead from 1819 to 2010 🩸

Have you read any of these? 👀

🪦 “From my grave to wander I am forc’d,
Still to seek The Good’s long−sever’d link,
Still to love the bridegroom I have lost,
And the life−blood of his heart to drink.”🪦

From: The Bride of Corinth – Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe – 1797 (Germany)

🎨 Cover art: ‘Volume III: The Court of the Dragon’ an illustration from ‘A Week of Kindness’ (1934) by Max Ernst
👉Animated via @canva ✨ by @haunted.margins

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7 days ago

Not only is this one of my favourite books of 2026, An Immaculate Deception by @isabelalivino is now on my list of favourite books of all time!

🥀Set in nineteenth-century Pernambuco, Brazil, the story follows Madalena, a young pregnant woman who finds herself recovering at her lover’s isolated estate after a carriage accident. What should be a place of refuge becomes increasingly disturbing, as Leandro’s behaviour changes and the house offers more questions than answers.

🖤I particularly loved the Brazilian setting. The decaying sugar estate gives the familiar Gothic mansion a specific history, with the remnants of slavery placing the family’s secrets within a wider legacy of violence. The locked rooms, strange reflections and unexplained details are atmospheric, but the setting has significance beyond its eerie appearance.

🥀The psychological and religious themes were what interested me most. Madalena’s upbringing shapes how she interprets desire, danger and her own suffering. Her familiarity with Dante’s Inferno adds another dimension to that fear: the possibility of punishment already exists in her imagination before she begins to understand what is happening around her. There is something deeply troubling about a woman having to negotiate her own shame while also trying to recognise the harm being done to her.

🖤The novel also raises uncomfortable questions about love and possession. When does devotion become entitlement? What happens when those who claim to care for someone begin making decisions that strip away her autonomy? Madalena’s dependence on others makes these questions especially urgent.

👉Halfway through the book, we change from Madalena’s POV, to Leandro’s👈 And I thought this was a brilliant decision— it gives the earlier scenes another layer of meaning!

🥀The twist is sooooo good!! And nothing I could have predicted 😍

✨An atmospheric, unsettling Gothic debut with plenty to discuss beneath its central mystery. Its exploration of faith, female autonomy and the frightening possibilities of twisted love is handled like a pro by Isabela Livino. by @haunted.margins

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12 days ago

🌹 Nuestra Señora de la Santa Muerte (‘Our Lady of Holy Death’ in Spanish) often shortened to Santa Muerte, is a religious movement, female deity and folk saint in Mexico.

💀Santa Muerte almost always appears as a female skeletal figure, clad in a long robe and holding one or more objects, usually a scythe and a globe.

🌹The new religious movement of Santa Muerte first came to widespread popular attention in Mexico in August 1998, when police arrested the notorious gangster Daniel Arizmendi López and discovered a shrine to the saint in his home. Widely reported in the press, this discovery inspired the common association between Santa Muerte, violence, and criminality in Mexican popular consciousness.

💀Santa Muerte continues to evoke controversy, even as her following grows rapidly. The Catholic and Protestant Churches have condemned devotion to Santa Muerte in Mexico and Latin America as blasphemous and satanic. Santa Muerte has also been defined by some local news outlets as a “narco-saint”.

Have you read any of the books featured in today’s recs? 👀 by @haunted.margins

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23 days ago

We’re officially entering Spooky Season! Yayyyy 👻

To celebrate, let’s take a (horrific) little trip down to stunning but mega spooky Vermont, USA.🎃

With over three-quarters of the state covered in trees and forests, the second least populated state in the country is home to legendary folklore, haunted historic sites, and eerie wilderness areas shrouded in mystery 🍁 👻

Have you read any of these yet? 👀 by @haunted.margins

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24 days ago

Sanya (@haunted.margins) is a queen when it comes to all things horror & thriller! It was so fun getting to chat with her all the way in FIJI about her love for books and what really moved her in the direction of horror.

Sanya’s Favorites:
📚 ‘An Immaculate Deception’ x @isabelalivino
📚 ‘The Sun Down Motel’ x @simonestjames
📚 ‘The Haunting of Aveline Jones’ x @philhickes
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#lithappenswithsyd #horrorbookrecommendations #bookrecommendations by @haunted.margins

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a month ago

I think about Time Travel and Slips at least (bare minimum) twice a day🙂‍↕️

Combine some slippery time with some very creepy folklore and we’ve got ourselves a cozy, little spooky recipe (at least for Horror lovers🤭)

Do you have any I should add to my tbr? 👀 by @haunted.margins

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a month ago

🎞️ The Unknown is @riley.sager at his most Gothic, cinematic and unsettling, blending an isolated-island mystery with old Hollywood darkness, spiritualism, buried trauma and the sinister machinery of the film industry.

🎥 A group of actresses travel to New Avalon Island to recreate the mysterious disappearance of five women from 1926, only for the production to begin eerily mirroring the original tragedy. The period costumes and séances to the strange noises, old diaries and abandoned dresses, Sager creates a wonderfully claustrophobic atmosphere.

🎞️ What interested me most, though, was the novel’s exploration of Hollywood culture and the exploitation of women within it. The actresses are constantly asked to surrender more of themselves in the name of authenticity, artistic vision and career opportunity. The book is particularly effective in showing how ambition can be weaponised against women by people who know they have more power, more influence and far less to lose.

🎥 There is a strong undercurrent of sexual harassment, coercion and predatory behaviour running through the story, as well as the familiar expectation that actresses remain agreeable, grateful and professional even when their boundaries are being crossed. Sager also examines the way abusive or manipulative directors can hide behind the mythology of artistic genius, reframing invasive behaviour as dedication to the work.

🎞️ The Gothic elements work beautifully alongside these themes. Spiritualism, grief, unreliable histories and the possibility of communicating with the dead all reinforce the idea that unresolved trauma has a way of returning.

🎥 My only real critique is that the final act becomes slightly overcomplicated. Sager loves a reversal, and there are moments where the sheer number of revelations threatens to overwhelm the eerie simplicity of the original mystery. I actually found the quieter, more atmospheric sections of the novel more unsettling than some of the later twists.

🎞️ Still, The Unknown is compulsively readable, stylish and packed with ideas!

Have you read The Unknown yet? 👀 by @haunted.margins

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a month ago

✨Gothic Egyptomania describes the morbid 19th- and early 20th-century Western obsession with ancient Egyptian mummies, curses, and the occult.

✨Surgeon Thomas Pettigrew hosted public spectacles where he unrolled mummies for cheering crowds; London’s Highgate Cemetery built its famous Egyptian Avenue in 1839 and Groups like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn repurposed Egyptian gods and protective amulets for ritual magic🔮

✨Egyptian Gothic Horror literature also spread like wildfire! Think: tombs and archaeological excavations, mummy curses, stolen antiquities, reincarnated queens, occult Egyptology, museum collections, imperial obsession and the sense that the ancient dead are very much not pleased about being disturbed 👻

If, like me, you’ve been obsessed with Ancient Egypt since you were little— these recs are especially for you 🥰 by @haunted.margins

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a month ago

Ok my haunted little readers! I NEEDED to share these insane new releases within True Crime, with you!

From two girls — decades apart — meeting an “imaginary friend” in the woods before both going missing (Cave Mountain) to a mysterious and dangerous stranger arriving in small-town Nebraska, posing as an all powerful being (The Vampire’s Cult) —- you will NOT believe the Horrors within these pages🫨

Do you have any True Crime recs you’d add to this list? 👀 by @haunted.margins

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a month ago

🩸 Lush, bloody, romantic and deliciously Gothic, She Haunts Me Still combines dark academia with New England folklore, female rage, queer desire, grief and generational horror.

🩸Mallory Webb arrives at Shore College hoping for a fresh start, but the university also happens to be her late mother’s alma mater—and is housed in a former sanitarium. When the terrifying, blood-covered woman who haunted Mallory during childhood reappears, she begins digging into her mother’s past and quickly discovers that whatever happened at Shore is far older and more complicated than she imagined. Oh and all this is set against the backdrop of Romeo and Juliet theatre rehearsals 🎭

🩸The atmosphere was easily one of my favourite things about this book. An old New England college, theatre rehearsals, seances, secret societies, hedge mazes, strange symbols, ghosts and buried histories—it has all the ingredients I want from a Gothic novel. Setting the story in 1999 was also such a good (cozy) choice.

🩸The Romeo and Juliet production running alongside Mallory’s investigation was another brilliant touch. Mallory is cast as Juliet, and as the novel progresses, the play’s themes of doomed love, inherited conflict and young people suffering because of decisions made before them begin to echo the larger story. Theatre itself becomes wonderfully eerie here—the dark stages, dressing rooms, rehearsals and strange intimacy of stepping into another person’s identity all lend themselves beautifully to horror.

🩸I will say that some readers on Goodreads found the novel (and romance) to be more YA-coded than they were expecting. I personally enjoyed that but the first half does take its time establishing everything, while the latter portion suddenly moves at breakneck speed as revelations begin piling up.

🔮She Haunts Me Still by @wordsbyde is perfect for readers who love haunted universities, dark academia, Gothic romance, New England folklore, theatrical horror, secret societies and complicated women!

Thank you to #Netgalley @duttonbooks for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. by @haunted.margins

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2 months ago