From Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Britons have been devouring gothic literature for over 200 years. But after more than two centuries is our appetite for the gothic finally starting to wane? To hell it is, writes novelist Katja Brown – it’s more alive than ever.
I’m often asked why the gothic still appeals. The genre is a creation that compels everyone from a lover of romantic fiction to a lover of blood and guts. Whilst it doesn’t hinge on these elements they add to it and create something that is constantly reinventing itself. The gothic is essentially the presentation of a ‘terrible beauty’, a collection of literary conventions that come together beautifully to scare, entrance and hook the reader. In what other genre could a character such as Dracula exist? He is a character you love to hate, the greatest anti-hero that has been thought up and is so loved by readers and authors alike that he has been revived ever since in one incarnation or another.
The gothic appeals because inside every reader there is still a spark, a need, a deep desire to be scared by something beautiful, something obscure and otherworldly. I think this genre inhabits the part of your imagination that wants to see the world differently, that imagines alternate possibilities to the norm and much like a vampire it doesn’t stay down for long. Once you pick up a gothic book it’s like a budding romance: you feel as if you have to know how it ends and the truth is… no one really knows why. It happens with other genres, sure, but the gothic has something special about it. You’ve heard that girls are attracted to the bad boys? Well it’s the same idea.
Throughout history the gothic has been the mother of great tomes and literary works of genius, manipulated and reshaped to fit the changing times. From Bram Stoker’s famous fanged fiend Dracula, to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we’ve watched as this genre has survived the stress of time and made it here to 2018. Thanks to a wealth of fabulous new gothic books, and also to the Twilight series, I’ve no doubt that it will keep kicking long after.
It has endured because we as humans want a thrill, we actively seek out the new and terrifying because we want to feel our hearts quicken, our palms get sweaty and the hairs on the back of our neck stand on end. It is the gothic that provides those sensations, every page walking the razors edge between dream and reality.
What’s so loveable is that behind the things that go bump in the night, behind the sublime descriptions, the complicated characters and the narrations I guarantee there will always be something to learn – from a moral lesson to something more practical (‘don’t go down the scary-looking corridor by yourself late at night). The gothic has and will probably always be used to impart some sort of wisdom from one person to the next and it doesn’t matter what piece of gothic literature you pick up, it’ll be there between the lines. All you have to do is look.
The gothic helps define us as people, understand our own identity by understanding what we are not. We are not immortal, so, unlike Dracula, we learn to live like there’s no tomorrow. We shape ourselves based on what knowledge we assimilate, but the gothic gives us imagination and way to step out of our lives for a few hundred pages, a chapter each night, a page between coffee and cake. That is why it appeals, why it still appeals, why it always will.
Katja Brown is an acclaimed gothic novelist. Her seat-of-the-pants debut novel, The First Bride (Austin Macauley) is out now in paperback and eBook from Amazon UK.