The recent release of The Bride has reignited something that was quietly smoldering — a hunger for steampunk horror. Searches for the subgenre have spiked dramatically in recent weeks, and it’s easy to understand why. There’s something uniquely compelling about horror set against a backdrop of brass gears, gaslit streets, and the dangerous optimism of an age that believed science could solve everything.
It couldn’t. That’s where the horror comes in.
What Makes Victorian Horror Different
Gothic horror has always found fertile ground in the Victorian era. The period was defined by a collision between rigid social order and the terrifying new possibilities of science — a combination that produces exactly the kind of dread good horror requires. Steampunk horror takes that foundation and amplifies it, adding technologies that feel both wondrous and monstrous.
The best steampunk horror doesn’t use the aesthetic as decoration. It uses the era’s specific anxieties — class, empire, the hubris of progress — as the engine of its scares.
A Strange Occurrence of Mayhem in Westminster
Mayhem is a Victorian horror novel built on a simple, devastating premise: what if Dr. Jekyll’s experiment hadn’t died with him?
An ambitious young doctor, convinced he can succeed where his predecessor failed, unleashes something far worse — a communicable affliction of the mind that spreads through London’s West End like plague, turning the most respectable streets in the empire into a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
The novel assembles an all-star cast of Victorian literary figures to face the crisis: Mina Harker, bringing telepathic residue of her encounter with Dracula. Dr. Watson. Captainess Aouda Fogg commanding an airship over burning London. What begins as an alternate history horror story becomes something closer to a Victorian superhero team-up — except the stakes are extinction-level and nobody is invincible.
A Strange Occurrence of Mayhem in Westminster is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.
Read more about the writing of Mayhem here.
A Labyrinth of Memories
Where Mayhem reaches for epidemic horror, Labyrinth goes darker and stranger. In this alternate Victorian history, time travel and body swapping are the emerging technologies — controlled by an invisible hand using them to hollow out entire villages and make a handful of men obscenely rich.
Coin is a commoner with nothing left but anger. When he’s drawn into a clandestine plot, he meets Helen — and when an experiment goes catastrophically wrong, they find themselves in each other’s bodies. Coin wants an immediate reversal. Helen, now a commoner but also a man in a man’s world, is less certain.
Labyrinth works as steampunk horror because the technology itself is the threat. The body swap isn’t played for comedy — it’s a violation, a loss of self, and the puppet master pulling the strings has no intention of making it right.
A Labyrinth of Memories is available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.
If The Bride Brought You Here
If the recent wave of steampunk horror has you looking for more, both of these novels live comfortably in that space — Victorian settings, science gone wrong, and the particular dread of a world that looks ordered on the surface and is anything but underneath.
Browse the full catalog at TimEKoch.com.