Where would we be without gothic literature? With its seductive blend of the strange and macabre, gothic literature is one of those few genres that is also a mood: castles, coffins and claustrophobia, yes, but also darkness, secrets and vengeance.
That flexibility helps the gothic slip in through the cracks, popping up in everything from the dark academia trend to TV’s Stranger Things. I found it sneaking into my second novel, The Birdcage Library, without even trying (though admittedly it is set in a castle).
More like this:
– The stories revealing super-rich lives
– Six ancient Norse myths resonating now
– A murder mystery that thrills 30 years on
It’s more than 200 years since Mary Shelley went on holiday with Lord Byron and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and, bored indoors, they challenged each other to write a ghost story. The outcome was pretty productive for the gothic genre by anyone’s standards: Shelley wrote Frankenstein, while Byron’s tale of an aristocratic vampyre laid the foundations for the bloodsucking tradition.
Since then, like Dracula himself, the gothic has refused to die – quite the opposite. #gothicliterature and #gothic lit have racked up more than 30 million views on TikTok; its moody sister, dark academia, has ruled the app for some time now.
That could be because the gothic is a “characteristically modern” genre, writes Professor John Bowen in an article for the British Library: it’s obsessed with technology (all those mad scientists), which helps it stay relevant, but that very newness is held in tension with the archaic, the ancient, and the strange. It teems with delicious darkness – or to put it in the words of the aptly-named critic Terry Castle, an “exorbitant hankering after horror, gloom and supernatural grotesquerie”.
With that in mind, here are eight gothic must-reads from past and present. The subjects and settings are enormously varied, but they all share this genre’s shadowy nature.
