So I’ve read a lot of both classic and modern Gothic fiction over the years. Gothic stories make me happy…I mean, in a cynical, disaffected, melancholy and perhaps overly dramatic way, they make me happy. I suspect it’s because I grew up in the 1980s and am neurodivergent, and had to crawl under my desk for nuclear drills and grew up under the auspices of Ronald “drugs are bad, ketchup is a vegetable, and all the gays can die of AIDS for all I care” Reagan.
I grew up in a world with all the shine worn off, I have always known that there’s something rotten in the state of South Dakota, and I have always been more than a little suspicious of anyone using the world “fine” in a non-sarcastic manner.
I’m going to look at the three main waves of Gothic fiction to try to pick apart where it came from and where it’s going in the future: from early Gothic horror roots, to Gothic romances, to this new stuff that looks a little different than either.
What makes for a really good modern Gothic story? One that doesn’t just pick up the trappings of the past?
First Wave of Gothic Fiction: Gothic Horror
Gothic fiction probably started in 1764 with Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto. It was called “Gothic” because…well. Because reasons.*
The main purpose of Gothic horror was to evoke a sense of place infused with atmospheric creepiness, where you can’t be sure whether something is a threat or not. I’d have to do a lot more research to be sure, but it seems to me that Gothic horror emerges most strongly whenever people feel like the social order is corrupt. The walls are crumbling and feel like they’re closing around you, and the source of the problem is mysterious and felt rather than understood.
Something is wrong…but what?
These early Gothics—let’s call the overall trend the first wave—were more horror than anything else. They were generally atmospheric, dramatic stories about 1) innocent women getting tossed around by men in power (Anne Radcliffe’s 1794 The Mysteries of Udolpho), or 2) men who have become evil and perverted, either because they were evil men to start with and threw off their restraints (Matthew Lewis’s 1796 The Monk) or because they were forced into evil somehow (William Godwin’s 1794 The Adventures of Caleb Williams).
Early Gothics may or may not have included supernatural elements, but generally included moments where the plot led characters and readers to question whether there were supernatural forces at work.
The peak of the first wave of Gothics (from the 1820s to 1840s) included a fair few anti-Catholic stories (Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer), lots of insanity and obsession with death (Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher), and tales of doomed love that weren’t about men abusing their power over innocent, helpless women (Emily Brontë’s 1847 Wuthering Heights).
After that, Gothics faded for a bit, but a Gothic revival in the late 1880s and 1890s included stories with new elements, such as those set in urban locations, often bordering on some type of underworld (Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), or using otherworldly rather than strictly supernatural elements (Robert W. Chambers’s 1895 The King in Yellow)—but also some solid throwbacks to old traditions of Gothic castles (Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula).
It’s a big timespan! And it might make more sense to break things down by saying there are three big waves rather than just one—and I’m not even mentioning all the juicy Gothic-style novels that were written in the early 20th century (Gaston Leroux’s 1909 The Phantom of the Opera).
The late 1700s were a time of revolution (American, French, Russian); the 1820s to 1840s saw the overturning of social order through a lot of nationalist revolutions that spanned from the fall of Napoleon to the 1848 Revolutions; the late Victorian era led right into World War I.
Actually, the first wave of Gothics never died out, really; it got subsumed into horror fiction as “weird fiction” and “atmospheric horror.”
…
*I went to look up why “Gothic” fiction was called that, thinking it would be because of the Gothic style of architecture, but it turns out that the Gothic style of architecture was never actually done by the Goths; the name comes from people mocking a French style of architecture with pointed arches that overturned the round arches of Greco-Roman architecture, overthrowing earlier architectural traditions the same way the Goths overthrew Rome. [Groaaaaaan.]
Second Wave of Gothic Fiction: Gothic Romance
Because I’m more of a horror reader than a contemporary romance reader, I’m not going to try to throw around a lot of names describing the flow of Gothic sensibilities into the romance genre, but start out with a note about contemporary romances that aren’t Gothic romances.
There’s something that puzzles me about ’em.
On the one hand, it seems like every time I try to write something that I want to call a romance, I get my hand slapped because the story doesn’t fit within current standards: the characters are too dark, or the plots are too complex or political, or there has to be a Happily Ever After (HEA) or Happily For Now (HFN) ending.
On the other hand, romance readers generally tend to track their roots back to Gothic horror novels with romantic subplots (like Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 Jane Eyre)—where the characters were dark, the plots were complex and often political, and happy endings were not guaranteed (and the ones where the characters were happy often involved some sort of tragedy anyway).
I talked to a friend who reads a lot of dark romances, and she says the situations get a bit fucked up and politics are okay now (and I believe her), but that HEA/HFN is still required.
Why?
I’m a big Jane Austen fan and understand the appeal of a light, fluffy romance, especially when it involves girls in pretty dresses. But demanding a HEA/HFN ending in every case seems wrong to me. Forced and grotesque, sometimes.
While most contemporary romances I’ve read seem to be blithely unaware of how creepy forcing the main couple to be happy together at the end of a novel can be, Gothic romances seem to have a more balanced approach, either letting the couple split apart (with the heroine often heading off toward a lesser but more wholesome partner) or exposing how creepy keeping them together can be.
I don’t dislike that sort of ending; I’m the kind of person who understands the appeal of a book like Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 Rebecca, but I don’t lose sight—ahem!—of how messed up some Gothic novel endings can be.
Romances (as the contemporary genre of women’s escapist fiction) seem to have started in the 1930s when the UK publisher Mills & Boon started publishing “brown books,” that is, hardback romance titles. (Later, Mills & Boon was bought out by Canadian publisher Harlequin Enterprises, and they continue to put out romance titles today.)
Gothic romances, though, really took off after Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 Rebecca, via UK publisher Gollancz.
Where Gothic romances differed from Gothic horror wasn’t prioritizing the romance elements over the horror ones, but integrating them. Romance is terrifying! Until fairly recently, individuals, families, and communities forced marriage and/or pregnancy upon a partner, who was then not allowed to leave an unsuitable relationship.
Moreover, I don’t think Gothic romances were ever really built like regular romances. The plots are different. The plots of most romances are about people overcoming obstacles to become partners; the plots of Gothic romances, like Rebecca, Anya Seton’s 1944 Dragonwyck, and Victoria Holt’s 1960 Mistress of Mellyn, are about people playing a game of “spot the asshole” in order to determine whether their partners are good for them or not.
The Sixties and Seventies, a time of great social upheaval from sexual mores to civil rights, saw a lot of Gothic romances.
Third Wave: Gothic…what?
But what about the Gothics that are being written now? Are they romances, horror, or what? Are they throwbacks to older genres, nostalgia for the creepy, atmospheric corruption of times past, or something else? Are Gothic horror and Gothic romances two completely separate threads of fiction now? And what about Southern Gothics, huh?!?
(Southern Gothics are just Gothic horror set in the South, for the most part. Lots of lovely, lush, overgrown corruption to be read there. Other types of regional Gothics are stories about how different parts of the world have their own particular flavor of falling apart. Also good.)
I think something new is emerging with modern Gothics. There’s a new flavor to them. Although unsettling, they often aren’t quite horror and they often don’t have any romantic elements. What they have in common with their predecessors is a sense of corruption and decay, of a system that is corrupt—but perhaps there are pleasant elements to be found within that corruption.
Modern Gothics include books like Anne Rice’s 1976 Interview with the Vampire, Poppy Z. Brite’s 1992 Lost Souls, Sarah Waters’s 1999 Affinity, Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s 2001 The Shadow of the Wind, and Sarah Perry’s 2018 Melmoth.
These books aren’t necessarily being written by dyed-in-the-wool Goths, but they are being written with the same sensibilities in mind…by authors who just happen to wear a noteworthy amount of black.
Where previous Gothics told stories of systems collapsing (and houses falling) and the survivors fleeing to safety and sanity or being punished for the evil of their ways, this new strain of modern Gothic tells a tale of morally gray people, neither fundamentally good nor spectacularly evil, trying to find home and family in the rotten ruins of a dying social order rather than fleeing.
I’m pretty sure this new element of moral grayness comes from the Goth subculture, which started out as a branch of the punk/post-punk music movement.
If the original punks were rebels who disdained gatekeepers and the artificial constraints of “professionalism” and wished to overthrow the corrupt systems from outside them, then the original Goths remained within the systems they deemed corrupt, reveling in and observing their decay, using their rule-breaking to expose hypocrisy rather than to destroy icons and flip tables.
The difference between punks and Goths seems to be a desire for order: punks seem to embrace anarchy and chaos now, while Goths seem to want to watch the old order die whenever.
Both paths are valid, to my mind, ways of dealing with a world where you grew up knowing you could die of nuclear war, and where you knew that your side wasn’t always the good guys…by a long shot. And both paths have endured to the present.
Science fiction has seen an exodus of “punks” spreading across its subgenres. Punk sensibilities entered science fiction with the New Wave in the 1960s and 70s (and Michael Moorcock’s editorship of the British sci-fi magazine New Worlds, in 1964), and becoming subgenres like cyberpunk, steampunk, dieselpunk, solar punk, and more. (Sci-fi has always been adaptable to questions of “what if?” that have always appealed to the revolutionary punks.) Goths seemed to be more drawn to horror and dark fantasy, with Interview with the Vampire leading the way.
The two flavors, punk and Goth, are not incompatible; a fair few stories have morally gray characters who leave corrupt systems and start flipping tables, especially when the story has sci-fi elements, like C.S. Friedman’s 1991 Black Sun Rising, China Miéville’s 2000 Perdido Street Station, and Jeff VanderMeer’s sorta-Southern-Gothic-Sci-Fi-Weird-Fiction 2014 Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance (The Southern Reach Trilogy).
I of course devour these stories when I find ’em.
The Name of the Gothic
What to call it, though?
I don’t know.
What I do know is that modern Gothic fiction that doesn’t have some acknowledgment of moral grayness and a decaying society seems odd to me: fake, flat, formulaic.
I don’t read Gothic fiction to escape and I can’t identify with the plucky, naïve heroines of the Sixties and Seventies. I did not marry into the weird household that may or may not be haunted; I literally grew up there. Horror novels without some kind of Gothic sensibility bore me to tears. Do I care about bad people chasing good people around with chainsaws or innocent kids having to pay for their parents’ questionable crimes? I do not. But set me up some morally gray protagonists who would rather be doing anything other than dealing with powers of even worse darkness but who are too stubborn to back down and I’m in.
The Gothic subculture sensibility being added to books suits my worldview to a T: dark but not nihilistic, atmospheric and moderately paced, as much about the internal life as it is about action and suspense. Lots of philosophy, dry humor, and irony.
No matter what genre these stories are found in, the tale remains at least somewhat the same: a morally gray person tries to navigate a corrupt world and take pleasure in its decay, with a goal of thriving within the ruins (if they fail, it’s often because of an inability to face dark truths, not because they are necessarily good or bad people as such).
Gothic sensibilities started with an overwrought joke about marauding tribes of barbarians overturning civilization in order to add pointed arches to churches; today Gothic sensibilities are more about building lush, dark atmosphere out of decay and ruin.
So turn on the smoke machine (and/or drum machine), put on your eyeliner and black nail polish, channel some Peter Murphy, and lace up your boots and sink into a modern Gothic tale of morally gray characters trying to make the best life they know.
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