The Enduring Appeal of the Gothic in Fiction

When I think of gothic fiction, I’m plunged into a moody setting. The scene is lit by candlelight and shadows dance in corners, while a shiver of dread slowly descends my spine. There’s nothing quite like the melodrama and heightened emotion of gothic literature to lift us out of the banal and everyday.

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It fills the imagination with crumbling windswept vistas and the romance of the past. In our digital age, the visceral fear conjured by the uncanny, or a hint of the supernatural, can absorb our attention in a way that endless doomscrolling never quite manages.

There has, of late, been a revival of interest in gothic literature. You can see a jump in online searches for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein on the release of Guillermo del Toro’s film adaptation. The same trend is visible for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which very loosely inspired the Emerald Fennell adaptation.

New readers are also discovering gothic-adjacent sub-genres such as dark academia. The Secret History, by Donna Tartt, and The Picture of Dorian Grey, by Oscar Wilde, are having a cultural moment on BookTok, long after their date of first publication. So what continues to draw readers to gothic fiction? In our modern, tech-driven age, why are we still lured into a fading past?

When you consider the era that created gothic fiction, it’s perhaps no surprise to see new readers enjoy these old classics. Some of the earliest examples of gothic novels date back to the 18^th century, when The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole, The Monk, by Matthew Gregory Lewis, and The Mysteries of Udolpho, by Ann Radcliffe, were all first published. This was the Age of Reason, a time when superstition and mysticism were out of favor, pushed aside by emerging Enlightenment philosophies that stressed the triumph of reason over the irrational.

Despite this, gothic novels were hugely popular with the reading public of the day. At times of rapid technological change, gothic stories evoke a lost past, striking a nostalgic chord. They allow the reader to forego rational explanation and, instead, indulge a purely emotional response that can feel transgressive. Within the safety of fiction, the reader feels the thrill of spine-tingling fear without immediately rationalizing it away. The reader may not really believe the house is haunted, but that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the pretense.

For writers drawn to the gothic, a key hallmark is the manifestation of an external threat in the physical world. Horror or fantasy gothic might lean into this element with a monstrous creature that is, within the fiction of the world, real to the characters. Other forms of the gothic lean into psychological dread, exploring the Self and the Other, which might be represented by the uncanny or the suggestion of supernatural forces at play. Characters who feel estranged from some part of themselves feature frequently in my own fiction.

Gothic elements are often found in contemporary historical fiction. In The Little Stranger, by Sarah Waters, the anxieties of the struggling Ayres family begin to manifest in the house in the form of strange marks on the wall and ghostly footsteps in the attic. In The Essex Serpent, by Sarah Perry, whisper and rumor about the titular serpent haunts a quiet village wrestling with the incursions of modernity and the social change that accompanies scientific discovery.

An abiding sense of dread often characterises a gothic novel. It is difficult to imagine a work of gothic fiction without that sense of imminent doom threaded through. They are stories laced with the threat of tragedy, where one or more of the characters is trying to escape a looming danger. In this way, gothic elements can creep into a variety of distinct stories, from southern gothic to scientific fiction.

The dread evoked is usually reflective of the underlying emotional state of the characters, feeding the gloomy atmosphere. Characters are often, in turn, shaped by this dread. Think of Merricat Blackwood in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, whose distrust of the arrival of her cousin, an outsider, sparks a series of events that deepen her isolation. For the reader, that sense of impending peril keeps the pages turning. For the writer, it is a valuable tool for maintaining suspense.

Gothic fiction often plays with ambiguity, providing a morally grey hero, or leaving unresolved the question of whether or not the ghost was real. Sometimes there are loose threads left behind, or multiple interpretations open to the reader.

As both a reader and a writer, I have a taste for ambiguity that—I acknowledge—is far from universal. While there are lots of readers who love a satisfying conclusion, I love when a writer takes a risk and leaves a little ambiguity. It is like a literary ellipsis, or a question mark placed after the words ‘The End’ in the closing shot of a film. The fictional world lives on after the final page, though it has become inaccessible to the reader.

It’s the great trick of a gothic story to let the dread linger on even after the book is finished. An ambiguous ending can be powerful, but it should be used cautiously and serve a thematic purpose. If the story is about the unresolvable nature of the past, a pat ending is unlikely to serve the broader theme. But a story that is simply left dangling is likely to rankle with readers.

Gothic literature has been around for almost as long as the novel as a literary form. You can find it in the “penny dreadfuls” of Mrs Radcliffe, the ghost stories of Henry James, and the southern gothic of Percival Everett’s The Trees and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.

For writers, it offers a rich source of inspiration and terrific storytelling tools, even for those predominantly writing in other genres. It adds a layer of suspense, intrigue, and romanticism. Most important of all, it lets the imagination loose and lifts the lid on civilized society, revealing the chaotic, wild, and mysterious forces that lurk beneath.

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