\"May the Dead Keep You\" is doing gothic YA with a Wuthering Heights ghost and I respect the audacity

The big news with May the Dead Keep You is that it’s taking the mood and obsession of Wuthering Heights and twisting it into YA gothic horror, with an excerpt already out in the wild. That is not a soft reimagining. That is a “we are going to make this mess supernatural” choice.

Here’s what’s been laid out: a girl living on an isolated estate called the Heights, a scientist and his son moving nearby to study the forest, and the son has the kind of ability that instantly turns the entire story into a moral disaster, raising the dead.

What I like about this setup is that it understands why classic gothic stories still work. They’re not just romance with storm clouds. They’re about isolation, cruelty, obsession, and people turning their love into a weapon. If the book actually leans into the themes it’s been described as tackling, generational trauma, abuse, forbidden yearning, it could get genuinely heavy while still delivering the creepy estate energy people want.

And because it’s YA, there’s also that specific flavor of horror where everything feels sharper because you’re watching characters figure out what the world is capable of in real time. That’s a different kind of dread than adult gothic, and when it lands, it lands hard.

Are you into literary-gothic horror when it gets adapted like this, or do you prefer original worlds with no classics hanging over them?