The Intrigue of Family Curses: How Supernatural Elements Elevate Crime Fiction
Author Daco S. Auffenorde discusses the intrigue of family curses, including how supernatural elements can elevate crime fiction.
Some families hide skeletons. What if those bones are still moving?
Crime fiction thrives on cold, hard logic—the meticulous detective connecting clues, the satisfaction of justice served. It’s a genre built on answering specific questions: Who did it? How? Why? But introduce a whisper of the supernatural, and suddenly the game changes. Now we’re not just asking who or why—we’re questioning reality itself and wondering whether the rules of logic even apply. Add a family curse into the mix, and the stakes become intensely personal.
This delicious collision of genres takes everything we love about crime stories and gives it an electric jolt. That’s the magic of supernatural crime fiction (books and film)—it transforms the familiar into something wonderfully strange. Supernatural crime fiction commonly employs otherworldly beings, ghosts, cursed objects, psychic abilities, and phenomena beyond scientific understandings of the natural world. Recently, more and more stories have broken away from the single-genre confines, incorporating elements from crime, fantasy, horror, gothic, supernatural fiction. The lines between genres have blurred, and the results are thrilling.
Edgar Allan Poe, who helped define modern crime fiction, also pioneered Gothic tales. In The Fall of the House of Usher, Poe explores the decaying legacy of an aristocratic family. Their mansion, with its Gothic archway and crumbling walls, symbolizes both physical and moral deterioration. Poe vividly portrays emotions essential to Gothic fiction, like fear, impending doom, and guilt. Roderick Usher suffers from “a constitutional and a family evil,” mirrored by the mansion’s grim state, whose gray walls have directly affected the “morale” of Usher’s “existence.” Poe weaves tension and suspense by fusing the psychological weight of a curse with an eerie ancestral home.
Modern authors have continued this tradition. For example, in Ruth Ware’s The Death of Mrs. Westaway, Hal, aware that an inheritance isn’t rightfully hers, travels to the family’s estate, only to find herself entangled in the crumbling walls of dark family secrets and in a blood tie she didn’t expect.
Successful supernatural crime fiction reimagines classic detective tropes. Take Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. It begins as a classic Sherlock Holmes mystery, rooted in deductive reasoning. But the stakes intensify dramatically once the reader realizes that the legendary hound haunting Dartmoor is tied to the Baskerville family—a curse! Similarly, Agatha Christie’s exploration of the supernatural emerges in The Pale Horse, a seemingly rational mystery that veers into the world of black magic, hexes, and curses. Some believe this to be Christie’s best work. Christie’s The Sittaford Mystery opens with a séance eerily predicting the murder of Captain Trevelyan, effectively making the séance a curse in itself. These stories resonate because they take the solid foundation of detective fiction and tilt it just enough to make us question everything.
More recently, consider the movie Ghost, where Sam Wheat knows his death wasn’t accidental. Trapped between worlds, Sam desperately seeks justice and protection for his beloved, Molly Jensen. He enlists Oda Mae Brown, a con-artist psychic who gets the shock of her life when she discovers she genuinely can communicate with the dead. Their unlikely partnership elevates a straightforward murder plot into something profound—a narrative illustrating how justice might transcend death itself. The supernatural element doesn’t diminish, but rather amplifies the gravity of the crime, compelling us to consider justice beyond mortality.
Many contemporary thriller and mystery writers are embracing supernatural elements to heighten suspense. Riley Sager’s mystery-thriller The House Across the Lake follows a widow retreating to her family’s lake house, where she becomes obsessed with the glamorous neighbors across the water. When the neighbor’s wife disappears, the widow’s curiosity plunges her into a dark mystery, intensified by surprising supernatural twists. Sager utilizes props—binoculars that are more than they seem—and a lake setting shrouded in unsettling mystery to enhance the suspense. Most assuredly, there’s been something amiss about that lake for quite some time.
Lisa Unger delves into supernatural dread in The New Couple in 5B. A financially strapped couple inherits his uncle’s luxury apartment building. Little did they suspect that the place had such a dark history. Crimes, deaths, suicides, and now another murder compel the wife to discover the truth lurking within the walls of the place, even if it means seeing and talking to ghosts. The setting is again cursed!
Robert Gwaltney’s Southern Gothic novel, The Cicada Tree, introduces a cicada plague unleashing darkness in a small Georgia town. Dark family secrets of the wealthy Mayfields and supernatural awakenings in young piano prodigy Analeise Newell threaten her very existence. Gwaltney masterfully weaves Gothic horror, family curses, and the supernatural into a haunting tapestry.
Our literary world is evolving rapidly, expanding possibilities for both writers and readers—an exciting development.
Which brings us to my latest thriller, The Medici Curse, and those wiggling bones. Anna de’ Medici Rossi returns to her ancestral Tuscan villa, the place where her mother suffered a violent death when Anna was just 12 years old. Anna isn’t merely confronting a decades-old cold case; she’s wrestling with a rumored family curse, a missing heirloom necklace, and the haunting possibility that her own recurring night terrors might hold the key to her mother’s death. What if there’s no curse at all, only a daughter chasing shadows through empty halls, where every creak is grief playing cruel tricks, and the only ghosts are the ones she conjures herself? What if generations of deaths in her family are merely tragic coincidences, and her visions during night terrors are symptoms of unresolved trauma rather than supernatural warnings? Whatever the truth, the weight of her family’s dark legacy is overwhelming.
The supernatural elements in The Medici Curse don’t detract from its essence as a crime thriller. Instead, they transform every revelation into a question: Is this real or imagined? That’s the brilliant alchemy of combining supernatural elements with crime fiction—it takes our fascination with logical puzzles and adds the thrilling shiver of the unknown. Next time you pick up a mystery, ask yourself: Could this story use a ghost? A curse? Perhaps even a time-traveling detective? Because when done right, supernatural elements don’t weaken crime fiction—they make it infinitely richer.
Dead men do tell tales—especially in crime fiction.
Check out Daco S. Auffenorde's The Medici Curse here:
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