Writing (and Reading) The Gothic Novel

9 themes for the lovers and freaks + a gothilit masterlist

Welcome belfry bats, brooding poets, and shrieking heroines! I have heard your requests for a guide to crafting a gothic novel and class is now in session! Those who read to the end will be rewarded with my personal syllabus of beloved gothic novels, both classical and contemporary.

If you’re new here, hello! I’m Saint, and I write Sunday Times and USA Today bestselling gothic romance and dark fantasy under the name S.T. Gibson. I’m best known for my polyamorous Dracula’s brides retelling, A DOWRY OF BLOOD, which explores romantic obsession, domestic terror, and emancipation through an epistolatory format. I’ve also written a dark academia Carmilla retelling (AN EDUCATION IN MALICE) and I have a gothic erotic romance forthcoming from Orbit (SAVAGE BLOOMS). I also have a bachelor’s degree in literature, so we’re gonna put that to work today as I walk you through the nine themes that distinguish gothic literature, in my humble lovergirl opinion.

As always, your mileage will vary! These are the themes that I’ve latched on to as a reader and writer, and hopefully most of your favorite gothic tropes fall under my nine lace-trimmed parasols. But if I’ve missed a key element of the gothic you love, don’t hesitate to share it with me in the comments.

Supplementary Materials

Before we get started, I want to direct you to some amazing audio-visual resources regarding the gothic. The Romancing The Gothic Youtube channel is a wealth of lectures, author interviews, academic discussions, and artist roundtables about this genre. The Esoterica Youtube channel’s video on The Historical and Philosophical Origins of Goth and Gothic Horror is fabulous as well.

A Goth By Any Other Name

I’m going to ruffle some feathers and say that I do not define the gothic as an aesthetic. Gothic aesthetics do exist in music, fashion, art, film, and of course literature, and many of those stylistic expressions have roots in gothic genre conventions, but I am more interested in excavating the flowering tree of crushed velvet and cathedral windows to take a look at the meaty roots beneath. Namely, the themes, arenas of engagement, and narrative modalities that make a gothic novel gothic. It’s elitism hours, I fear, but words mean things, and aesthetics are only useful in so far as they express deep engagement with something beyond visual signifiers!

So let’s unearth this coffin and get our hands dirty with some literary theory.

1. Chiaroscuro

“Chiaroscuro” is an Italian term for an artistic technique which uses strong contrast between light and dark to create a heightened sense of depth and volume, as well as boldness and emotionality. Put simply, black looks blacker next to white, beauty is most evident when contrasted with the grotesque, and nothing heightens desire like fear. It’s easy to flatten gothic literature into a catch-all for everything creepy and macabre and dreary, and while those are gothic elements, they are most effectively deployed against contrasting themes of hope, beauty, or awe. Contrast makes those big, melodramatic emotions really soar through the reader, helping them access higher highs and lower lowers. I’d argue it’s actually difficult to overplay your hand as a gothic author in terms of taking things too far, so long as your lights and darks are complimentary in intensity.

Chiaroscuro is the quintessence of the gothic genre. It’s why books can still feel gothic even when removed from traditional Western European Victorian gothic trappings like the haunted ancestral house on the moors. The Gothic isn’t just a collection of tropes, it’s an storytelling approach expressed through high contrast.

2. Regionality

There is not one genre of gothic literature, but rather many gothics. Some of the most well-known gothic subgenres are Victorian Gothic, Southern Gothic, Mexican Gothic (encapsulated not only by the titular novel but by books like Isabel Cañas’ THE HACIENDA and V. Castro’s IMMORTAL PLEASURES), and Florida Gothic (check out SWAMPLANDIA by Karen Russell and MOSTLY DEAD THINGS by Kirstin Arnett).

A good gothic novel is deeply informed by a sense of place. Every community has its own dark underbelly to be explored, it’s own local rituals and landmarks and social mores to be examined and inverted. If there’s beauty to be found in every corner in the world, there is also the gruesome, the unsettling, the suppressed. An author can write from experience about the place that raised them or reflect on somewhere they visited in person or through fiction, but they will always shine most when they dig down into what makes their setting uniquely strange.

If specificity is the soul of poetry, reigioniality is the heart of the gothic.

3. Religiosity and the Spirit Realm

Whether an author is exploring faith through a devotional lens, inverting religious symbolism for a little blasphemous spice, wrestling with institutional religious teaching, or putting forward philosophical points on the nature of the human soul, religion tends to show up quite a bit in gothic literature.

Historically, “religion” was almost always Christianity, reflecting the genre’s roots in 19th century Western Europe. But even within the bounds of a Christian framework (whether Catholic or Protestant or hung in the tense balance between both), divination, prophetic dreams, the ghosts, witchcraft, and family curses all have a part to play. The line between the religious, the supernatural, and the spiritual is exceptionally blurry in the gothic, as it is so often in life. Themes that might feel a little far-fetched in a grounded contemporary novel set in a secularized world are right at home in the gothic. Anecdotally, I keep coming back to the gothic because of the permission and space it gives me to get messy and deep and freaky with religion, one of my favorite subjects.

You do not have to deploy heavy religious themes to write a good gothic novel, but you should be paying attention to your character’s souls, and to the unseen forces acting on them, whether those forces are psychological, theological, or occult.

4. Inheritance (Alexa, Play Apple by Charli XCX)

I’m talking inheritance both in terms of legal transfers of property, wealth, and titles, as well as in what we inherit through our twisted family trees, sins-of-the-father style. From Anne Radcliffe to Silvia Moreno-Garcia, the characters in gothic novels are subject to and driven by economic factors. It could be the transfer of a family fortune to an outsider or lecherous uncle through marriage to a virgin heroine, a will that’s been tampered with after the death of a patriarch, a family driven to unspeakable deeds to save their crumbling estate from ruin (I loved the way this was handled in Crimson Peak), or two lovers kept apart and ruinously miserable through the economic, racial, and class factors that forbid their union (Heathcliff and Cathy, of course).

The gothic is deeply engaged with money and class, and even when it appears to not be. Even in stories that hyper-focused on the tragic drama of a single aristocratic family, that isolated, self-destructive myopia is commentary in itself.

It’s worth nothing here that gothics often explore these economic factors through a single family or community instead of on a large, systemic scale. This intimacy allows the author to dig into the human consequences of most diffuse economic principles, to really show what something like a ban on divorce or a forced marriage or a squandered inheritance does to a family. In this way monetary inheritance can be linked to the inheritance of hereditary features like appearance, mental illness, patterns of behavior, or supernatural abilities. Nothing exists in a vacuum. We’re all subject to what our forebears have done, and the gifts and curses they left behind.

As I like to put it: are you doomed by the narrative or doomed by Living In A Society?

(If reading a book about doomed, bloodline-obsessed characters transgressing social and sexual mores while trying to break a family out of five generations of magical suffering and slow economic dilapidation sounds cool to you, the link for my queer, polyamorous gothic SAVAGE BLOOMS is right here)

5. The House as a Site of Horror

The house is haunted, the house is alive, the house is cursed, the house has a mind of its own, the house loves you, the house hates you, the house is a portal, the house is a tomb, the house is a parallel universe where all the sweetest sins are permitted, the house is hell, the house is purgatory, the house is something you carry around inside you that you will never be free from.

Many gothic novels are by nature claustrophobic: they take place almost entirely within the bounds of a family home, or perhaps an estate, or a small community. The deeper you go into the belly of the house, the nearer you draw to the foundational traumas or enchantments or repressed memories upon which the house (and the family, and the story) is built.

The horror in a gothic novel, even it’s larger-than-life, is often, at it’s core, domestic.

6. Tension Between Convention and Desire

There’s an undeniable eroticism, a fleshy carnality and forbidden yearning, running through many gothic novels. This eroticism can be sublimated or directly expressed, but there’s often an element of repression, borne from the friction between what the characters truly desire and what society, or tradition, will permit.