Oh, I enjoyed *We Were Liars* but I had already had a good opinion of E Lockhart's YA work before Tiktok was a thing (like I said, I held onto this book from 2015, which is a while!).

I recently did read a few BookTok books just to get an informed opinion. I am now informed and I have an opinion and it's that some of them are bad books because they are sincere but unskilled efforts by authors aiming beyond their abilities to tell stories I find rather dull, and some are cynical cashgrabs to mimic the sincere efforts. (ACOTAR being the first, Fourth Wing being the latter.) I think that BookTok has some good niches for recommendation, but I think that I'm going to avoid anything that is written since TikTok blew up.

E Lockhart's writing is good, tends to be a bit lyrical and full of imagery, and feels very in character - she tends to write rather close to the character's POV, even if she's not always in first person - I find it engaging. I think *Liars* got popular on BookTok because, in addition to having rather beautiful prose, it does have a first person POV for a young woman with a secret and an interesting mystery plot with some good twists - I think it does haves something enjoyable to offer the kind of people would read *Fourth Wing* and burn thru it without noticing how bad the writing it so that they could absorb the story.

I will also say that E Lockhart has written several works that are catnip to me because they deal with old money institutions around New England (in a fictionalized version), and I have to live with those things, so I like having fiction reflect how irksome they are. If you want to sample some of her work without the BookTok aura, I really enjoyed The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (which has a similar main character with a bit more agency and much less deadly stakes) and the Ruby Oliver quartet: The Boyfriend List, The Boy Book, The Treasure Map of Boys, and Real Live Boyfriends. (which are written diary style by a character in high school who has to go to therapy) But again, it's been a decade since I read these, and my memories may be off.

Of things I have read recently in the Gothic Vibe: Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle is more horror but has solid roots in a Gothic tradition - our heroine must uncover the secrets of the gay conversion therapy camp in her home down while she tries to remember the horrible thing that was done to her; What Moves the Dead by T Kingfisher is a story in the continuation of the House of Usher, with some twists. Piranesi is a gentle kind of Gothic - the secret monster has swallowed the main character whole and he has not desire to escape, but the decision is being mad for him. The Locked Tomb Trilogy of four books was tonally complicated to call Gothic but deals with a lot of the themes - the voice is deeply off from the spooky vibes of deliberately Gothic books, but the actual plot and world are very very Gothic.

And if you're interested in a bit of nonfiction, The Gothic: Very Short Introductions by Nick Groom was something I read last year and really enjoyed how it followed the thread of why Gothic went from meaning German tribes in the Classical era to a type of fiction.

Lol, this got long - I was thinking over your comment for a couple of busy days and now you've got the end result!