A Warm and Timorous Welcome

If you’re coming here from my first attempt at a curated approach to my love for horror media, I’m sure you’ll find this a vast improvement. If you’re stumbling across this for the first time, well then, count me relieved you never saw the first iteration of this dreary and potentially ill-fated experiment before this moment. Regardless of who you are or why you’re here — welcome! Please accept my sincere condolences for what you are about to experience.

If you had told me this time last year that I would be someone who blogged, regularly, and not under threat of extreme bodily injury, I probably would have laughed in your face. Then again, this hasn’t exactly been the most normal of years — and for me, in my personal life, it has been a year rife with grief, turmoil, and listlessness. Not really what you came for, is it? But then again what else did you expect? This is a blog about all things Gothic, and things are, thus, bound to get dreary sometimes.

But I digress. This is an introduction to this strange experiment in hurling my somewhat knowledgeable voice into the deep and unforgiving digital void, so I shouldn’t scare you off too quickly. Preferably, if you are ever scared, it shouldn’t be me that’s causing it.

I have a few things in mind for an introductory post. Firstly, I’d like to set expectations about what the website will look like, or at the very least my preliminary plans for the content, and give you an idea of the structure and form of what that content will look like. Secondly, I’d like to devote a brief section to a layman’s overview of the Gothic, how it informs my perspective on horror, and why I think it’s important to think critically about a series of genres that have for many years been relegated to the unsavoury sidelines of “cheap” entertainment. Thirdly, and perhaps finally for this inaugural post, I’d like to give you a rundown of the first cycle’s content, and encourage you to reach out on my social media accounts to start conversations about some of the things you may find there. I will also take suggestions for what you may want to find here in the future. Basically, just feel free to start conversations about past, present, future, and potential content on here. I would love to hear your perspectives on what I’m writing about.  

So, let’s dive in. I’m going to keep this blog relatively informal. Book reviews and musings, movie reviews and rambles. Photography, makeup, news, music, etc. I plan on giving spoiler alerts when necessary and having a spoiler-free and detail-based analysis for each post. Don’t worry, though, it won’t get too far into the realm of literary criticism. I am, after all, trying to read for pleasure. I don’t have to make everything into a bloody lecture.

So, to begin: a brief overview of the Gothic. I find this a bit tricky, particularly as the nature of the Gothic is slippery, much like the intangibility of much of what it foregrounds. I’m also trying to keep in mind that in this venue, I am not trying to prove my intellectual worth with the most academic definition I can, but instead offer a tangible set of elements that seem to be relatively universal and ground them in my academic background. But communicate them for a general audience. Ah, well, here goes nothing.

It is generally accepted that the Gothic as a genre was born in the British Romantic period of literature. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, published in 1764, established the hallmarks of the genre: ruined castles, dastardly villains, pitiful ghosts, and intricate plotlines meant to shock, horrify, and excite readers at a visceral level. The genre evolved to make its mark on the 18th century with The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe in 1794, and The Monk by Matthew Lewis in 1796. By the nineteenth century (my main interest), the Gothic stepped down as a central genre but saw renaissances throughout the century where the haunting, uncanny elements of the Gothic were moved to more recognizable venues, like statehouses and doctors offices.

In 1816, a fateful trip to Lake Geneva and a subsequent ghost story contest involving Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and John Polidori (among others) gave birth to some of the most recognizable titles in literary history: Polidori’s The Vampyre and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (both 1816). These novels forever changed the genre, and their stories continue to have an impact today. Among other recognizable names and titles of nineteenth-century Gothic are Edgar Ellan Poe’s work (gaining notoriety in the 1840s), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and finally the famous Dracula, written by Bram Stoker in 1897. The genre has now splintered into numerous subgenres, spinoffs, modes, “vibes,” and aesthetics, many of which I plan to cover as this project continues.

I must clarify that the Gothic is not synonymous with horror, although there are elements that overlap, particularly in setting, mood, and certain design or narrative choices that evoke that kind of uneasiness that the genre is so well known for. Horror is, especially in the twenty-first century, kind of its own thing entirely, now, which is why I’ve billed this as a “Gothic and horror media blog” and not just a Gothic-horror media blog. There is untold merit in paying critical attention to horror films, books, short stories, and internet phenomena: just like the Gothic craze in centuries past, our deep most social and cultural anxieties are presented through the thinly veiled metaphors of our horror media. Perhaps we feel comforted by the distance the metaphor of a ghost or ghoul provides. Perhaps bodies in horror just feel expendable. I guess that remains to be seen.

I will be starting with a goal of one post a week. The first real post will cover Things in Jars (2019) by Jess Kidd, a stunning contemporary Gothic mystery novel set in London in the 1860s. Next, I plan on publishing a thought piece about eurocentrism in contemporary Gothic and possible subversions of that dangerous inclination. That will lead into post three, on Mexican Gothic (2020) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, an interesting twist on the conventions of the classic Gothic novel. And finally, to conclude the first cycle, I’d like to write on Del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015). This last post is purely self-indulgent: it’s my favourite film and I’ve been itching to write about it for some time now, although I’ve never found the right venue to do so academically.

And I think, with that, I’ve done quite enough directionless musing for one night. I do, truly, hope you find something worthwhile here. But if you don’t, that’s okay. This is my haunted mansion of wonderings, and you are welcome to haunt it – as malevolently or benignly – as you see fit.