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[Edmond Dantès]

What is Gothic? Neil Gaimen's view:

"The difference between Gothic and horror is mood. Horror wants to scare you. Horror wants to creep you out. It wants to revolt you, to shake you up and to attack your preconceptions. Good horror does... and bad horror will achieve it anyway whether it's trying to or not. Gothic for me is all about mood, the mood is misty, things are ominous, things move very slowly. The idea is that your are dislocating the world of the person viewing it and living it and you are taking them to somewhere subtly more menacing. The world of a horror film - and obviously some horror films can obviously be Gothic - is an inimical world, it is a world that is out to get you and it will destroy you. You may survive a horror film if you are lucky, a virgin, noble or just far enough off camera that nobody cares if you live or die, but basically you are in a random world that means you harm. The Gothic world is not a random world that means you harm, the Gothic world has a brain behind it, the Gothic world has a mind. The Gothic world is moving slowly, and really, you should come away from a good piece of Gothic experience just feeling that the world is a more misty or dark, more threatening place perhaps, but still one that is capable of being understood. There is no random chaos and slaughter in a Gothic from my perspective."


In the following text Professor John Mullan examines the origins of the Gothic, explaining how the genre became one of the most popular of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and the subsequent integration of Gothic elements into mainstream Victorian fiction.

Gothic fiction began as a sophisticated joke. Horace Walpole first applied the word ‘Gothic’ to a novel in the subtitle – ‘A Gothic Story’ – of The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764. When he used the word it meant something like ‘barbarous’, as well as ‘deriving from the Middle Ages’. Walpole pretended that the story itself was an antique relic, providing a preface in which a translator claims to have discovered the tale, published in Italian in 1529, ‘in the library of an ancient catholic family in the north of England’. The story itself, ‘founded on truth’, was written three or four centuries earlier still (Preface). Some readers were duly deceived by this fiction and aggrieved when it was revealed to be a modern ‘fake’.

The novel itself tells a supernatural tale in which Manfred, the gloomy Prince of Otranto, develops an irresistible passion for the beautiful young woman who was to have married his son and heir. The novel opens memorably with this son being crushed to death by the huge helmet from a statue of a previous Prince of Otranto, and throughout the novel the very fabric of the castle comes to supernatural life until villainy is defeated. Walpole, who made his own house at Strawberry Hill into a mock-Gothic building, had discovered a fictional territory that has been exploited ever since. Gothic involves the supernatural (or the promise of the supernatural), it often involves the discovery of mysterious elements of antiquity, and it usually takes its protagonists into strange or frightening old buildings.

The Mysteries of Udolpho

In the 1790s, novelists rediscovered what Walpole had imagined. The doyenne of Gothic novelists was Ann Radcliffe, and her most famous novel, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) took its title from the name of a fictional Italian castle where much of the action is set. Like Walpole, she created a brooding aristocratic villain, Montoni, to threaten her resourceful virgin heroine Emily with an unspeakable fate. All of Radcliffe’s novels are set in foreign lands, often with lengthy descriptions of sublime scenery. Udolpho is set amongst the dark and looming Apennine Mountains – Radcliffe derived her settings from travel books. On the title page of most of her novels was the description that was far more common than the word ‘gothic’: her usual subtitle was ‘A Romance’. Other Gothic novelists of the period used the same word for their tales, advertising their supernatural thrills. A publishing company, Minerva Press, grew up simply to provide an eager public with this new kind of fiction.

Northanger Abbey

Radcliffe’s fiction was the natural target for Jane Austen’s satire in Northanger Abbey. The book’s novel-loving heroine, Catherine Morland, imposes on reality the Gothic plots with which she is familiar. In fact, Radcliffe’s mysteries all turn out to have natural, if complicated, explanations. Some critics, like Coleridge, complained about her timidity in this respect. Yet she had made a discovery: ‘gothic’ truly came alive in the thoughts and anxieties of her characters. Gothic has always been more about fear of the supernatural than the supernatural itself. Other Gothic novelists were less circumspect than Radliffe. Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), was an experiment in how outrageous a Gothic novelist can be. After a parade of ghosts, demons and sexually inflamed monks, it has a final guest appearance by Satan himself.

Frankenstein and the double

A second wave of Gothic novels in the second and third decades of the 19th century established new conventions. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) gave a scientific form to the supernatural formula. Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) featured a Byronic anti-hero who had sold his soul for a prolonged life. And James Hogg’s elaborately titled The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) is the story of a man pursued by his own double. A character’s sense of encountering a double of him- or herself, also essential to Frankenstein, was established as a powerful new Gothic motif. Doubles crop up throughout Gothic fiction, the most famous example being the late 19th-century Gothic novella, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

This motif is one of the reasons why Sigmund Freud’s concept of the uncanny (or unheimlich, as it is in German) is often applied to Gothic fiction. In his 1919 paper on ‘The Uncanny’ Freud drew his examples from the Gothic tales of E T A Hoffmann in order to account for the special feeling of disquiet – the sense of the uncanny – that they aroused. He argued that the making strange of what should be familiar is essential to this, and that it is disturbing and fascinating because it recalls us to our original infantile separation from or origin in the womb.

Extreme psychological states and horror

Another writer who commonly exploited doubles in his Gothic tales was the American Edgar Allan Poe. He used many of the standard properties of Gothic (medieval settings, castles and ancient houses, aristocratic corruption) but turned these into an exploration of extreme psychological states. He was attracted to the genre because he was fascinated by fear. In his hands Gothic was becoming ‘horror’, a term properly applied to the most famous late-Victorian example of Gothic, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The opening section of Dracula uses some familiar Gothic properties: the castle whose chambers contain the mystery that the protagonist must solve; the sublime scenery that emphasises his isolation. Stoker learned from the vampire stories that had appeared earlier in the 19th century (notably Carmilla (1872) by Sheridan Le Fanu, who was his friend and collaborator) and exploited the narrative methods of Wilkie Collins’s ‘sensation fiction’. Dracula is written in the form of journal entries and letters by various characters, caught up in the horror of events. The fear and uncertainty on which Gothic had always relied is enacted in the narration.

The Gothic in mainstream Victorian fiction

Meanwhile Gothic had become so influential that we can detect its elements in much mainstream Victorian fiction. Both Emily and Charlotte Brontë included intimations of the supernatural within narratives that were otherwise attentive to the realities of time, place and material constraint. In the opening episode of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the narrator, Lockwood, has to stay the night at Heathcliff’s house because of heavy snow. He finds Cathy’s diary, written as a child, and nods off while reading it. There follows a powerfully narrated nightmare in which an icy hand reaches to him through the window and the voice of Catherine Linton calls to be let in. The vision seems to prefigure what he will later discover about the history of Cathy and Heathcliff. Half in jest, Lockwood tells Heathcliff that Wuthering Heights is haunted; the novel, centred as it is on a house, seems to exploit in a new way the Gothic idea that entering an old building means entering the stories of those who have lived in it before.

Two of Charlotte Brontë’s novels, Jane Eyre and Villette, feature old buildings that appear to be haunted. As in the Gothic fiction of Ann Radliffe, the apparition seen by Jane Eyre in Thornfield Hall, where she is a governess, and the ghostly nun glimpsed by Lucy Snowe in the attic of the old Pensionnat where she teaches, have rational explanations. But Charlotte Brontë likes to raise the fears of her protagonists as to the presence of the supernatural, as if they were latterday Gothic heroines. Gothic still provides the vocabulary of apprehensiveness. Similarly, Wilkie Collins may have introduced into fiction, as Henry James said, ‘those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors’, but he liked his reminders of traditional Gothic plots. In The Woman in White, all events turn out to be humanly contrived, yet the sudden appearance to the night-time walker of the figure of ‘a solitary Woman, dressed from head to foot in white garments’ haunts the reader as it does the narrator, Walter Hartright (ch. 4). The Moonstone is a detective story with a scientific explanation, but we never forget the legend that surrounds the diamond of the title, and the curse on those who steal it – a curse that seems to come true. The final triumph of Gothic is to become, as in these examples, a vital thread within novels that otherwise take pains to convince us of what is probable and rational.

What does it mean to say a text is Gothic? Professor John Bowen considers some of the best-known Gothic novels of the late 18th and 19th centuries, exploring the features they have in common, including marginal places, transitional time periods and the use of fear and manipulation.

Gothic is a literary genre, and a characteristically modern one. The word ‘genre’ comes from the Latin ‘genus’ which means ‘kind’. So to ask what genre a text belongs to is to ask what kind of text it is. A genre isn’t like a box in which a group of texts all neatly fit and can be safely classified; there is no essence or a single element that belongs to all Gothics. It is more like a family of texts or stories. All members of a family don’t look the same and they don’t necessarily have a single trait in common, but they do have overlapping characteristics, motifs and traits. The genre of Gothic is a particularly strange and perverse family of texts which themselves are full of strange families, irrigated with scenes of rape and incest, and surrounded by marginal, uncertain and illegitimate members. It is never quite clear what is or is not a legitimate member of the now huge Gothic family, made up not just of novels, poems and stories but of films, music, videogames, opera, comics and fashion, all belonging – and not quite belonging – together. But they do have some important traits in common.

Strange places

It is usual for characters in Gothic fiction to find themselves in a strange place; somewhere other, different, mysterious. It is often threatening or violent, sometimes sexually enticing, often a prison. In Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula, for example, Jonathan Harker, a young lawyer’s clerk, suddenly finds himself trapped within Castle Dracula. That scene occurs in Central Europe, but often in classic Gothic fiction – in the novels of Ann Radcliffe for example – it takes place in distant, marginal, mysterious southern Europe; and it could just as easily be somewhere like Satis House in Great Expectations, a decaying mansion just down the road.

Clashing time periods

Just as places are often mysterious, lost, dark or secret in Gothic fiction, so too are its characteristic times. Gothics often take place at moments of transition (between the medieval period and the Renaissance, for example) or bring together radically different times. There is a strong opposition (but also a mysterious affinity) in the Gothic between the very modern and the ancient or archaic, as everything that characters and readers think that they’ve safely left behind comes back with a vengeance.

Sigmund Freud wrote a celebrated essay on ’The Uncanny’ (1919), which he defined as ‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar’. Gothic novels are full of such uncanny effects – simultaneously frightening, unfamiliar and yet also strangely familiar. A past that should be over and done with suddenly erupts within the present and deranges it. This is one reason why Gothic loves modern technology almost as much as it does ghosts. A ghost is something from the past that is out of its proper time or place and which brings with it a demand, a curse or a plea. Ghosts, like gothics, disrupt our sense of what is present and what is past, what is ancient and what is modern, which is why a novel like Dracula is as full of the modern technology of its period – typewriters, shorthand, recording machines – as it is of vampires, destruction and death.

Power and constraint

The Gothic world is fascinated by violent differences in power, and its stories are full of constraint, entrapment and forced actions. Scenes of extreme threat and isolation – either physical or psychological – are always happening or about to happen. A young woman in danger, such as the orphan Emily St Aubert in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) or Lucy Westenra in Dracula, is often at the centre of Gothic fiction. Against such vulnerable women are set the great criminals or transgressors, such as the villainous Montoni in The Mysteries of Udolpho or Count Dracula. Cursed, obscene or satanic, they seem able to break norms, laws and taboos at will. Sexual difference is thus at the heart of the Gothic, and its plots are often driven by the exploration of questions of sexual desire, pleasure, power and pain. It has a freedom that much realistic fiction does not, to speak about the erotic, particularly illegitimate or transgressive sexuality, and is full of same-sex desire, perversion, obsession, voyeurism and sexual violence. At times, as in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), Gothic can come close to pornography.

Terror versus horror

Why do readers take such pleasure in Gothic’s descriptions of frightening and horrible events, and might there be something wrong or immoral in doing so? The pioneering gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe was particularly troubled by these questions and in trying to answer them, made an important distinction between ‘terror’ and ‘horror’. Terror, which she thought characterised her own work, could be morally uplifting. It does not show horrific things explicitly but only suggests them. This, she thinks, ‘expands the soul’ of the readers of her works and helps them to be more alert to the possibility of things beyond their everyday life and understanding. Horror, by contrast, Radcliffe argues, ‘freezes and nearly annihilates’ the senses of its readers because it shows atrocious things too explicitly. This is morally dangerous and produces the wrong kind of excitement in the reader. Whereas there might be the fear or suggestion of the possibility of sexual assault or rape, for example, in a Radcliffe novel, there is explicit description of such scenes in The Monk. Terror, which can be morally good, characterises the former; horror, which is morally bad, the latter. Terror for Radcliffe is concerned with the psychological experience of being full of fear and dread and thus of recognising human limits; horror by contrast focuses on the horrific object or event itself, with essentially damaging or limiting consequences for the reader’s state of mind.

A world of doubt

Gothic is thus a world of doubt, particularly doubt about the supernatural and the spiritual. It seeks to create in our minds the possibility that there may be things beyond human power, reason and knowledge. But that possibility is constantly accompanied by uncertainty. In Radcliffe’s work, even the most terrifying things turn out to have rational, non-supernatural explanations; by contrast, in Lewis’s The Monk, Satan himself appears. The uncertainty that goes with Gothic is very characteristic of a world in which orthodox religious belief is waning; there is both an exaggerated interest in the supernatural and the constant possibility that even very astonishing things will turn out to be explicable. This intellectual doubt is constantly accompanied by the most powerful affects or emotions that the writer can invoke. The 18th-century philosopher and politician Edmund Burke in his 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful made a vital distinction between the beautiful and the sublime which has shaped much modern thinking about art. Beauty, for Burke, is characterised by order, harmony and proportion. Sublime experiences, by contrast – the kind we get for example from being on a high mountain in a great storm – are excessive ones, in which we encounter the mighty, the terrible and the awesome. Gothic, it is clear, is intended to give us the experience of the sublime, to shock us out of the limits of our everyday lives with the possibility of things beyond reason and explanation, in the shape of awesome and terrifying characters, and inexplicable and profound events.

Exhibition at the British Library (3 October 2014 – 20 January 2015)

Two hundred rare objects trace 250 years of the Gothic tradition, exploring our enduring fascination with the mysterious, the terrifying and the macabre.

From Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker to Stanley Kubrick and Alexander McQueen, via posters, books, film and even a vampire-slaying kit, experience the dark shadow the Gothic imagination has cast across film, art, music, fashion, architecture and our daily lives.

Beginning with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, Gothic literature challenged the moral certainties of the 18th century. By exploring the dark romance of the medieval past with its castles and abbeys, its wild landscapes and fascination with the supernatural, Gothic writers placed imagination firmly at the heart of their work - and our culture.

Iconic works, such as handwritten drafts of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the modern horrors of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser highlight how contemporary fears have been addressed by generation after generation.

Terror and Wonder presents an intriguing glimpse of a fascinating and mysterious world. Experience 250 years of Gothic’s dark shadow.

Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination


Who are your preferred purveyors of the Gothic, the macabre and the weird? And what tales and images from the worlds of literature, film and art stir your insides like no other?

 

[Oveja Negra]

Goth damn great thread, OP.

 

[lord quas]

I love Poe... I think The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar is absolutely horrifying

 

[Vagabundo]

Ctrl-F lovecraft :/

 

[Colonel Mustard]

Very in-depth analysis, OP.

Rebecca is probably my favorite piece of Gothic Literature. The build up to all hell breaking loose was appreciated for an otherwise dry novel.

I do have to say Jane Eyre is the biggest piece of shit I've ever been forced to read though. (Which is funny considering the parallels between the two books.)

 

[Dascu]

Lovely thread.

Personally, I am an enormous fan of the type of Gothic horror found in the films by Hammer studios. Even though they're not very scary, I just adore the gloomy and dark settings of those old castles and mansions.

 

[Oveja Negra]

Lovecraft is awesome, but my pick would be Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe's terror is so damn elegant and kinda subtle. One of my favs from him is Berenice. It's the kind of story that grabs you from the beginning and when you reach the end, there's no way to not be in a "holy crap" state.

Again, fabulantastic thread, Edmond

 

[Vagabundo]

Here's weird tales/Gothic trilogy that has connections:

Edgar Alan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,
Jules Verne, An Antarctic Mystery,
HP Lovecraft, At The Mountains of Madness.

 

[braves01]

Thanks, OP. That's a great flashback to the Gothic lit course I took back in school and really enjoyed. I think I read just about everything listed in that big excerpt.

My favorites were Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Monk; Least favorites were Castle of Otranto, Northanger Abbey, and Ann Radcliffe (she was okay in small doses, but having to read Mysteries of Udolpho in a week was a little much). The essay on the Uncanny by Freud was really interesting, too. I'm surprised Shakespeare didn't get a nod in there somewhere (or maybe I missed it) as a distant precursor for the ghosts, murders, and general ambiance in Hamlet and Macbeth.

 

[Kitsunebaby]

Poe has been my favorite author since I was a little kid. He's probably the reason for my obsessive love of psychological horror and macabre.

While I'm familiar with more than a few of the authors mentioned so far, I've never really made a point to explore the genre in its entirety. I'm looking forward to more recommendations.

 

[Edmond Dantès]

Here's weird tales/Gothic trilogy that has connections:

Edgar Alan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,
Jules Verne, An Antarctic Mystery,
HP Lovecraft, At The Mountains of Madness.

To add to At the Mountains of Madness; The Outsider and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward capture the essence of Gothic tradition very well.

And one mustn't forget Lovecraft's contemporary; Clark Ashton Smith. A master of the macabre and exquisite prose and poetry. The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis was certainly inspired by At the Mountains of Madness. He had even read an early manuscript of the tale and remarked in a letter to Lovecraft; "I read the story twice - parts of it three of four times - and think it is one of your masterpieces... I'll never forget your descriptions of that tremendous non-human architecture and the on-rushing shoggoth in an underworld cavern!"

Lovecraft, Smith and Robert E. Howard all shared various aspects of their respective myths throughout their writing careers. Alas, Smith is the lesser known of the three today.

 

[Edmond Dantès]

In terms of Clark Ashton Smith, I'd recommend the following tales:

• The Double Shadow
• The City of the Singing Flame
• The Devotee of Evil
• The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis
• Genius Loci
• The Face by the River
• Ubbo-Sathla
• The Treader of the Dust

 

[Dascu]

In terms of Clark Ashton Smith, I'd recommend the following tales:

• The Double Shadow
• The City of the Singing Flame
• The Devotee of Evil
• The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis
• Genius Loci
• The Face by the River
• Ubbo-Sathla
• The Treader of the Dust

I must admit I was not familiar with this author or his work. But you've certainly got my attention. Thanks for the recommendations!

 

[Vagabundo]

Links to my suggestions:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Narrative_of_Arthur_Gordon_Pym
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Antarctic_Mystery
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/At_the_Mountains_of_Madness

To add to At the Mountains of Madness; The Outsider and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward capture the essence of Gothic tradition very well.

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward is probably Lovecraft's most accomplished story. At the Mountains of Madness comes close though.

Two more tales that comes to mind are The Festival and the Hound. It's hard to go wrong with Lovecraft the writing is so evocative.

Lovecraft, Smith and Robert E. Howard all shared various aspects of their respective myths throughout their writing careers. Alas, Smith is the lesser known of the three today.

I'll add this as well:

"The Willows" is one of Algernon Blackwood's best known short stories. American horror author H.P. Lovecraft considered it to be the finest supernatural tale in English literature.[

I loved it and its not very long: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Willows

And such an amazing name; Algernon Blackwood.

One more thing I like about Gothic Horrors is the link to poetry, some of the stories are almost poems. One of my favourites is Poe's The Bells:

I.
Hear the sledges with the bells—
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells—
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_the_Late_Edgar_Allan_Poe/Volume_2/The_Bells

 

[Edmond Dantès]

Speaking of poetry; the follow are examples of Clark Ashton Smith's prose poetry:

A Dream of Lethe

In the quest of her whom I had lost, I came at length to the shores of Lethe, under the vault of an immense, empty, ebon sky, from which all the stars had vanished one by one. Proceeding I knew not whence, a pale, elusive light as of the waning moon, or the phantasmal phosphorescence of a dead sun, lay dimly and without lustre on the sable stream, and on the black, flowerless meadows. By this light, I saw many wandering souls of men and women, who came, hesitantly or in haste, to drink of the slow unmurmuring waters. But among all these, there were none who departed in haste, and many who stayed to watch, with unseeing eyes, the calm and waveless movement of the stream. At length in the lily-tall and gracile form, and the still, uplifted face of a woman who stood apart from the rest, I saw the one whom I had sought; and, hastening to her side, with a heart wherein old memories sang like a nest of nightingales, was fain to take her by the hand. But in the pale, immutable eyes, and wan, unmoving lips that were raised to mine, I saw no light of memory, nor any tremor of recognition. And knowing now that she had forgotten, I turned away despairingly, and finding the river at my side, was suddenly aware of my ancient thirst for its waters, a thirst I had once thought to satisfy at many diverse springs, but in vain. Stooping hastily, I drank, and rising again, perceived that the light had died or disappeared, and that all the land was like the land of a dreamless slumber, wherein I could no longer distinguish the faces of my companions. Nor was I able to remember any longer why I wished to drink of the waters of oblivion.

The Touch-Stone

Nasiphra the philosopher had sought through many years and in many lands for the fabled touch-stone, which was said to reveal the true nature of all things. He had found all manner of stones, from the single boulders that have been carven into the pyramids of monarchs, to the tiny gems that are visible only through a magnifying-glass, but since none of them had effected any change or manifest alteration in the materials with which they were brought in contact, Nasiphra knew that they were not the thing he desired. But the real existence of a touch-stone had been affirmed by all the ancient writers and thinkers, and so, he was loath to abandon his quest, in spite of the appalling number of mineral substances which had been proven to lack the requisite qualities,

One day Nasiphra saw a large oval pebble lying in the gutter, and picked it up through force of habit, though he had no idea that it could be the touch-stone. Its color was an ordinary grey, and the form was no less commonplace than the color. But when Nasiphra took the pebble in his hand, he was startled out of his philosophic calm by the curious results: the fingers that held the pebble had suddenly become those of a skeleton, gleaming white and thin and fleshless in the sunlight; and Nasiphra knew by this token that he had found the touch-stone. He proceeded to make many tests of its add properties, all with truly singular results; it revealed to him the fact that his house was a mouldy sepulchre, that his library was a collection of worm eaten rubbish, that his friends were skeletons, mummies, jackdaws and hyenas, that his wife was a cheap and meretricious trull, that the city in which he lived was an ant-heat, and the world itself a gulf of shadow and emptiness. In truth there was no limit to the disconserting and terrible disclosures that were made by this ordinary-looking pebble. So after a time, Nasiphra threw it away, preferring to share with other men the common illusions, the friendly and benign mirages that made our existence possible.

The Mirror in the Hall of Ebony

From the nethermost profound of slumber, from a gulf beyond the sun and stars that illume the Lethean shoals and the vague lands of somnolent visions, I floated on a black unrippling tide to the dark threshold of a dream. And in this dream I stood at the end of a long hall that was ceiled and floored and walled with black ebony, and was lit with a light that fell not from the sun or moon nor from any lamp. The hall was without doors or windows, and at the further extreme an oval mirror was framed in the wall. And standing there, I remembered nothing of all that had been; and the other dreams of sleep, and the dream of birth and of everything thereafter, were alike forgotten. And forgotten too was the name I had found among men, and the other names whereby the daughters of dream had known me; and memory was no older than my coming to that hall. But I wondered not, nor was I troubled thereby, and naught was strange to me: for the tide that had borne me to this threshold was the tide of Lethe.

Anon, though I knew not why, my feet were drawn adown the hall, and I approached the oval mirror. And in the mirror I beheld the haggard face that was mine, and the red mark on the cheek where one I loved had struck me in her anger, and the mark on the throat where her lips had kissed me in amorous devotion. And, seeing this, I remembered all that had been; and the other dreams of sleep, and the dream of birth and of everything thereafter, alike returned to me. And thus I recalled the name I had assumed beneath the terrene sun, and the names I had borne beneath the suns of sleep and of reverie. And I marvelled much, and was enormously troubled, and all things were most strange to me, and all things were as of yore.

 

[Noaloha]

I wouldn't have considered Lovecraft 'Gothic' horror; similar, sure, but still distinct. I always just kept it in a 'weird shit' horror compartment. I think I heard the term 'cosmic horror' used for Lovecraft in a recent podcast about Clockwork Empires, which is a term I quite like.

The Gaiman quote from the OP suggests that a Gothic horror setting should be one that's capable of comprehension, which is somewhat directly contrary to how I take my Lovecraft, "The Gothic world is moving slowly, and really, you should come away from a good piece of Gothic experience just feeling that the world is a more misty or dark, more threatening place perhaps, but still one that is capable of being understood. There is no random chaos and slaughter in a Gothic from my perspective."

Not that strict genre classification matters particularly.

 

[HORRORSHØW]

oh god i had to read northanger abbey for one of my lit classes. loved shelley's frankenstein, though.

 

[teruterubozu]

Love me some American Gothic, like Hawthorne.
Although "Gothic" seems like a retroactive label for very common Western literary tropes.

 

[Pickman]

Lovecraft first and foremost for me, but he's been mentioned a lot already.

For the gothic sense of dread and exquisite writing, Ambrose Bierce is a good entry. He's definitely a more American author, with some of his body of work focusing on the Civil War, but it captures that intense sense of dread like Poe in a great way.

 

[Vagabundo]

I'd say Lovecraft - and his Mythos contemporaries - made their own niche in the Gothic genre, they were strongly influenced by the Gothic authors that went before them, and Cosmic Horror is really just how they evolved the genre.

If pushed i'd list Cosmic horror, and Weird Tales in general, as a sub genre of Gothic Horror, but it close enough that I don't think it matters all that much.

As an aside I was talking to my wife last night about gothic fiction and she mentioned that she read Frankenstein when she was a teenager and she cried her eyes out with pity for Frankenstein's monster. <3 Shelly.

oh god i had to read northanger abbey for one of my lit classes. loved shelley's frankenstein, though.

While hunting around on the net about Gothic I found this referenced as a parody of gothic, is it any good? I guess from the tone you didn't think so.

I've been put off Austen when I was force fed Emma at a young age in school, but I was willing to give her another chance after enjoying a TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

 

[Peru]

I love THE NUN in Villette - such a great punch line to the limited and unreliable first person perspective. You start to believe in it yourself.

I do have to say Jane Eyre is the biggest piece of shit I've ever been forced to read though. (Which is funny considering the parallels between the two books.)

Charlotte Brontë is my favorite author - curious what you find so off-putting about the book?

While hunting around on the net about Gothic I found this referenced as a parody of gothic, is it any good? I guess from the tone you didn't think so.

I've been put off Austen when I was force fed Emma at a young age in school, but I was willing to give her another chance after enjoying a TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

It's good - it's early Austen so the tone is a bit different, more openly mocking and playful. Lighthearted and good fun. Her best works imo are Persuasion and.. maybe Mansfield Park. Can't really go wrong, though your Emma is probably the least likeable heroine. IMO no one after Shakespere had as great a grasp on the subtleties of the English language - razor sharp writing.

 

[Vagabundo]

Charlotte Brontë is my favorite author - curious what you find so off-putting about the book?

I gave Jane Eyre a good shot myself there last year. While nothing about the book was bad the character and story just didn't hook me enough to keep me reading - I stopped just after she'd gotten the job as a teacher to some kid.

It's good - it's early Austen so the tone is a bit different, more openly mocking and playful. Lighthearted and good fun. Her best works imo are Persuasion and.. maybe Mansfield Park. Can't really go wrong, though your Emma is probably the least likeable heroine. IMO no one after Shakespere had as great a grasp on the subtleties of the English language - razor sharp writing.

Sold. I've just finished 20000 Leagues under the Sea, so my classical fiction binge can continue.

 

[Peru]

I gave Jane Eyre a good shot myself there last year. While nothing about the book was bad the character and story just didn't hook me enough to keep me reading - I stopped just after she'd gotten the job as a teacher to some kid.

That's really early on in the book, though. Some don't like her stubbornness or indeed the gothic elements of the book, but she usually leaves some impression on people.

What really got to me on the last read-through was, on one hand Jane Eyre The Destroyer, this supremely solid, unmoveable force who walks through life head held high to see her enemies crumble and literally die around her as they try and fail to move her or change her or enter her ideas in any way, and on the other side the Jane coming back to these eerie ruminations on losing herself completely, the whole, incontrovertible being of Jane Eyre, looking ahead to her potential marriage with Rochester "smote and stunned" by fear of becoming "not I, but one Jane Rochester", "an ape in a harlequin's jacket" and in another case later on "down the torrent of his will into the gulf of his existence, and there lose my own". This supernatural depth and majesty to her characters' introspection is so powerful and so consistent through all her four very different novels and maybe the reason she's my favorite

 

[Ashes]

I was thinking of visiting the exhibition. Might as well subscribe.

 

[indigo-cyclops]

Lovecraft first and foremost for me, but he's been mentioned a lot already.

For the gothic sense of dread and exquisite writing, Ambrose Bierce is a good entry. He's definitely a more American author, with some of his body of work focusing on the Civil War, but it captures that intense sense of dread like Poe in a great way.

Bierce is a great name drop, love his work. Thanks for the great thread, very informative.

 

[Professor Renegade]

Frankenstein is my all time favourite book. I also like to view it as one of the first science fiction stories.

 

[The Artful Dodger]

Oh man. I'm excited for this thread. Subscribed. I'll comment more when I get a chance. I took a class on Gothic Lit and its one of my favorite genres.


Dantes, you've done it again!

Edit:

Edit: I'll add a Gothic story, that is tops but not purely Gothic but still well within the genre... Les Chants de Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont

Spoiler

(pseudonym of Isidore Ducasse)

is an amazing read.

 

[Edmond Dantès]

Ray Russell's Gothic stories are well worth tracking down. His 'Unholy Trinity' (Sanguinarius, Sagittarius, Sardonicus) in particular. Others include:

• The Cage
• Comet Wine
• The Sword of Laertes
• The Vendetta
• Last Will And Testament
• The Runaway Lovers
• The Case Against Satan
• Incubus

 

[Edmond Dantès]

The BBC celebrates all things Gothic

BBC Two, BBC Four and the British Library are celebrating all things Gothic with a new season of programmes exploring the literature, architecture, music and artworks that have taken such a prominent place in British culture.

A host of famous literary faces will look back on Frankenstein&#8217;s creation in A Dark And Stormy Night: When Horror Was Born, while in The Art Of Gothic, Andrew Graham-Dixon looks back at how Victorian Britain turned to the past for inspiration to create some of Britain&#8217;s most famous artwork and buildings.

In The Genius Of The Gothic, Dr Janina Ramirez looks at Perpendicular Gothic, Britain&#8217;s first cultural style and Dan Cruickshank looks back at Gothic architecture&#8217;s most influential family in The Family that Built Gothic Britain.

BBC Four delves into the archives uncovering classic performances from Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, The Cure, Sisters of Mercy, The Mission and more in Goths At The BBC.

What's on:

The Art Of Gothic: Britain's Midnight Hour, BBC Four - Mon 20th October, 9pm

The season starts with this three-part series in which Andrew Graham-Dixon looks back at 19th century Britain and its obsession with all things Gothic. The series explores how an inspired group of architects and artists spurned the modern age, turning to Britain&#8217;s medieval past to create some of Britain&#8217;s most iconic works and buildings.

Inspired by the tumultuous Industrial Revolution, John Ruskin was among those who created architectural wonders, using the cutting edge of technology to create a brand-new British style of architecture. While in art and literature, the Gothic allowed Horace Walpole, Bram Stoker and Dickens to capture the terror, weirdness and social ills that plagued Victorian Britain.

Dan Cruickshank and the Family that Built Gothic Britain, BBC Four - Tue 21st October, 9pm

Dan Cruickshank explores how the great icons of Gothic British architecture were all created by one brilliant, if highly dysfunctional family &#8211; the mighty Scotts. Built by the Scotts over a single century, St Pancras Station, the Albert Memorial, Liverpool Cathedral, Battersea Power Station, Dulwich College, the chamber of the House of Commons and even the red phone box, were built by a grand-father, a father and son who defined Britain&#8217;s new architectural style.

A Dark And Stormy Night: When Horror Was Born, BBC Two

The season then moves to BBC Two, with a fascinating exploration of one of the most significant moments in Gothic history: the night when Mary Shelley, Lord Byron and their cohorts gathered together in Lake Geneva to tell ghost stories. The night when Frankenstein was born. Drawing on British Library manuscripts and archives, the one-hour documentary will bring together a stellar cast of Gothic, horror, science-fiction writers and historians to discuss why one single night had such a significant impact on our culture.

The Genius of Gothic, BBC Four

Medieval historian Dr Janina Ramirez looks back at the 14th century, a time when craftsman and their patrons created the Perpendicular Gothic, a new form of architecture that was to be Britain&#8217;s first cultural style.

Dr Janina Ramirez recites Britain&#8217;s Perpendicular legacy, from its first stirrings at Gloucester Cathedral to its pinnacle at King&#8217;s College Chapel in Cambridge. Janina will show how the style emerged out of a cultural and political battle for Britain&#8217;s national identity and how the style was crushed during the Reformation of the 16th century &#8211; only to be reborn again during the Gothic Revival of the Victorians.

BBC Four Collection: Gothic Literature

A selection of archive programmes about some of the most celebrated Gothic novels, their authors and legacy, will also be available on BBC iPlayer.

Tuesday Documentary: The Dracula Business (6th August 1974)

Dan Farson, great nephew of Bram Stoker, travels to Romania and Transylvania to investigate the legends that surround Dracula.

The Bronte Business (4th September 1977)

Joan Bakewell visits Haworth in Yorkshire, home of the Bronte&#8217;s, to see the setting in which the novelist worked, that has now become a tourist spot.

The Strange Affair of&#8230; Frankenstein (7th January 1986)

Robert Symes investigates the background to Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein.

Ian Rankin Investigates Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (16th June 2007)

Ian Rankin investigates Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, first published in 1886, exploring the origins of the book and its relationship to Edinburgh.

 

[Indrid Cold1]

Fantastic thread. Your return to the forum unexpectedly out of the blue was like something from a gothic horror novel Edmond

I was amused by this infographic from the Guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/interactive/2014/may/09/reading-gothic-novel-pictures

Im also really looking forward to the documentary on that night in the Villa Diodati, when Frankenstein was born. People tend to forget that the gothic-romantic version of the suave, urbane, sophisticated vampire was born at the same time also, when John Polidori wrote The Vampyre.

 

[Edmond Dantès]

The Art of Gothic: Britain's Midnight Hour

Episode 1 - Liberty Diversity Depravity

In the middle of the 18th century - in England - an entirely surprising thing happened. Out of the Age of Enlightenment and Reason a monster was born - a Gothic obsession with monsters, ghouls, ghosts and things that go bump in the night. From restrained aristocratic beginnings to pornographic excesses, the Gothic revival came to influence popular art, architecture and literature.

Watch here:

YouTube Part 1
YouTube Part 2
YouTube Part 3
YouTube Part 4

BBC iPlayer


Documentaries presented by Andrew Graham-Dixon are always worth watching. The above is another example of his excellence.

 

[Edmond Dantès]

And one of the paintings featured in the episode:

Witches at their Incantations, by Salvator Rosa.

 

[Dascu]

The Art of Gothic: Britain's Midnight Hour


Watch here:

YouTube Part 1
YouTube Part 2
YouTube Part 3
YouTube Part 4

BBC iPlayer

Documentaries presented by Andrew Graham-Dixon are always worth watching. The above is another example of his excellence.

Just saw this post. The Youtube links are gone now. Do you know of any other source for non-UKers?

 

[Edmond Dantès]

Just saw this post. The Youtube links are gone now. Do you know of any other source for non-UKers?

Unfortunately no for that particular episode, but episode 3 of the series is available on Youtube here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVMUEm-c1Sw

Episode 2 is here, but may be blocked:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-5P4G1L36Y&feature=share

 

[bengraven]

It's cozy lit to me. I love the idea of the great big house, the Clue house, the Addams family, Usher house, the big Edwardian home. Two story libraries, black wrought iron gates, the study with it's one glass wall facing the misty old moors. The skittering in the walls, the strange cries outside in the dark that sound almost feminine, the crushing feeling on your mind when you step on a certain floor board, as if you've become hung over or some dark memory is threatening to expose itself.

I find comfort in gothic horror, believe it or not. Growing up in a dark house, an old old farm house broken down, sagging against it's own weight, chipped ceiling and ripped linoleum, it was none-the-less home. I find strange comfort in the cold rain outside, the wind blowing in through a hole in the wall, a crack in the floorboards exposing the outside world. And sometimes there's a shadow in a strange place outside your peripheral that seems to sink below your vision as your head turns, a gasp escaping only to be replaced by nervous laughter.

The dark basement with one single light flickering above a makeshift desk as you're reading Jim Lee X-men comics and listening to Army of Me...okay maybe not that last one.

In terms of Clark Ashton Smith, I'd recommend the following tales:

• The Double Shadow
• The City of the Singing Flame
• The Devotee of Evil
• The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis
• Genius Loci
• The Face by the River
• Ubbo-Sathla
• The Treader of the Dust

Nice to see you love Gothic literature as well and not many people name drop Clark Ashton Smith despite how popular he once was as one of the first Howard devotees.

For anyone is a fan of the Alien francise, Vaults of Voh-Vombis might be an inspiration for that. It may be the original source for face huggers.

 

[Edmond Dantès]

Nice to see you love Gothic literature as well and not many people name drop Clark Ashton Smith despite how popular he once was as one of the first Howard devotees.

For anyone is a fan of the Alien francise, Vaults of Voh-Vombis might be an inspiration for that. It may be the original source for face huggers.

Indeed. There's nothing quite like the tales of CAS. His prose is exquisite, delectable even.

 

[bengraven]

Speaking of Vaults, I can't recommend highly enough American Supernatural Tales by Penguin if you want more of an American Gothic story. It mostly strays away from the typical vampire and werewolf story with most stories featuring the unknown horror that lives in our house or watches from across the street or leaves behind gut piles on our front lawn. Lots of ghost and strange creature stories with all the big names: Lovecraft, Poe, King, Jackson, Hawthorne, and a few you might not recognize but might fall in love with. I learned about Smith, August Derleth and T.E.D. Klein through this collection and became big fans. Who doesn't love a story about Lovecraftian creatures and Amish folk?

Also, there's a Guillermo Del Toro edition that came out this year or last if you want a very pretty cover, but I love the screeching black cat that brings to mind an 80s VHS horror anthology cover.

In addition to that also, apparently Amazon updated their by-line to mention that this has Robert Chambers "The Yellow Sign", which is part of The King in Yellow, which was mentioned in True Detective last year.