Recently, staff have been noticing a lot of books that fall into the gothic horror category, and many of us are gobbling them up like candy and swapping recommendations with each other. Some of us are reading new titles, and some are going back and reading the classics. Generally speaking, though, we are having fun with this fiction category. We even made a list.
One thing this list makes really clear is that Gothic lit is NOT new and that it comes in WAVES. There are different hypotheses for why this might be the case, but a lot of it is related to horror being more popular when people are generally more optimistic (you don’t get a lot of horror with copyright dates during WWI and WWII, for example.)
But that really doesn’t explain all the horror being published recently, because general optimism is definitely not what is going on in the world these days!
Gothic’s origins date back to the end of the 18th century and into the beginning of the 19th century. While there are many examples, the one I usually think about is Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolfo because I love Jane Austen, and in Northanger Abbey (a gothic tale in its own right) Catherine Morland is obsessed with Radcliffe’s work. This wave also includes horror classic Frankenstein.
Gothic then goes quiet for a while. Except, always the iconoclast, Poe did all his Poe-ing in the middle of the century like the rebel he was. That’s also when the Bronte sisters were writing. Then comes a new fin de siècle wave featuring Dracula, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Turn of the Screw, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The fact that the authors’ genders of this wave were primarily male intrigues me, but I don’t necessarily have an easy answer as to why that might have happened, other than to note that these are the books we remember from those periods, and not necessarily all there was. It is also true that, back in the day, gothic novels were seen as something for ladies to use to while away their time and not necessarily as ART. While we see women’s writing of the past through our modern lens of the Western Literary Canon, the reading of novels was, at one time, considered as frivolous as binge watching reality TV might be considered today. (BTW if binge watching reality TV is your jam, we’ve got your back…how we spend our time is very much a personal choice and, here at Library Connect, we do not judge media consumption choices. You do you.)
We don’t see much gothic lit during the beginning of the 20th century during WWI or the Depression and then, BOOM, here comes Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. Then there’s a break for WWII, followed by Shirley Jackson in the fifties with Haunting of Hill House. Then we wrap up the 20th century with some biggies: Stephen King, Ann Rice, Toni Morrison, and even VC Andrews.
And that brings us to all the great gothic lit being written now.
At this point, I want to acknowledge that this is a genre that definitely started in Europe, and that this historical rundown is by almost exclusively white authors. You will find some South American and African representation on the list though! It is also the case that the more recent crop of gothic lit has a bit more diversity.
But all of this begs the question: WHAT EVEN IS GOTHIC? And because it really is kind of a vibe, it’s the sort of thing you learn to identify by reading it. But, you might correctly point out, if I’m looking for a gothic book to read, and I have to read it to recognize it, then that’s not very helpful; and you’d be totally right. That’s what the list is for!
But there are a few things that are universal in all gothic fiction.
- The sense of place. Usually a house. Think Rebecca’s Manderley. Think Hill House. But also think how Stephen King uses small town Maine. This can become claustrophobic within the narrative as the plot progresses and the main characters seem trapped within whatever authorial boundaries have been set. (This is why I think we’re seeing so much of it now, it may have been produced by the isolation of the pandemic.)
- The past intruding on the present. This can look like ghost stories a la The Haunting of Hill House. It can also look like potential hauntings that turn out to be not supernatural at all, which can be experienced through The Secret Garden or Jane Eyre. It can also look like a mystery for the main character to solve, as in Rebecca. It can even look like a split narrative, as with the more recent Plain Bad Heroines.
- It can be self-referential. We see this with Northanger Abbey. You often see callouts to prior works within the texts…and this sets us up for *trumpet fanfare* retellings. Because we’ve seen a lot of those lately. T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead is just a remix of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Mindy McGinnis’s The Initial Insult remixes a bunch of Poe’s work. There are also modern Turn of the Screw and Jane Eyre retellings in the form of Ware’s Turn of the Key and Hawkin’s The Wife Upstairs. Basically, gothic fiction becomes more fun the more of it you read because you can see the references pile up. Any of these can be enjoyed without knowing the back story, BUT it can be even more fun if you’ve read what precedes it (and isn’t that exactly the same as the past intruding on the present?)
When in doubt though, modern book publishers are very savvy marketers, and they definitely will tell you when a book is gothic…BUT they will also tell you a book is gothic if it will get you to buy that book, even if that book is not actually gothic…and that’s not super helpful. That’s why we at Library Connect Blog are here for you. With Lists. All the lists.
And speaking of book publishers and marketing, we may also tell you how to decode modern book covers sometime soon; because if you know how to read their language, you really can judge a book by its cover!