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We’re going to step into dangerous waters in this post. Waters teeming with diehard Twilight fans and adjoining creek sides crawling with ferocious anti-Twilight adherents. But I’m not known as a fearless woman for nothing, so here goes.

And just as a note: I see both sides; writers tend to. I see the allure of the series. The ambiance, setting, character relationships and vampiric underworld that are so interesting to fans. But I also see the less-than-stellar writing and the ways in which Bella came across as a weak heroine.

[Last year, I released a YouTube video about how to write powerless characters, especially female ones, in such a way that readers will love them. In that video I discussed what should have been done differently with Bella’s character. If you’re interested in that, you can find it here.]

The key to answering this question is to review the themes of each of the books. What are they each exploring? What ideas are they putting forward behind the facade of fiction?

Beware: Plot Spoilers Ahead!

Twilight

The first book is an introduction to the world of Edward Cullen. Our heroine, Bella Swan moves to Forks, WA to live with her father while her mother travels with her new husband. As Bella seeks to find a place in this strange area that’s so different from her life in Arizona, she meets the Cullen family who are also new transplants to the area and who are also seen as outsiders.

Bella’s attraction to Edward and his to her is clear from the beginning. But something is different about Edward. He is drawn to her but then avoids her. He has an otherworldly aura about him. He is unnaturally cold and fast and strong. He seems to live on a plane outside of the human world in Forks that Bella dislikes so intensely. It isn’t surprising when she learns that he is a vampire.

The first book in the series explores death from a number of angles, including the death of Bella’s father’s friend, Waylon Forge (added in the movie, but not in the book). But the most important consideration of death is Bella’s awareness of her own mortality.

The movie is book-ended by a thought that Bella has: “I had never given much thought to how I would die, but dying in the place of someone I love doesn’t seem like such a bad way to go.”

It is this heightened awareness of her impending death that Bella faces in the first book. As she reflects on her ignorance in the matter, Bella comments that love is a worthy reason for death. This is, of course, foreshadowing. It is also the theme of the book:

Dying for someone you love is worthwhile.

New Moon

The second book deals heavily with time. The story opens with Bella’s eighteenth birthday. Rather than cause for celebration, Bella is overburdened by a sense of her own aging. Compared to the Cullens’ eternal youth, she is now focused on the clock. She has a vision/ dream of herself as an old woman at the beginning of the story. At the end she races towards the Volturi’s headquarters under the clanging of the massive clock tower.

This is complicated by the fact that Edward, aware of the potential danger to Bella that being around him and his family could cause, has separated himself from her and disappeared. Because of this, Bella pursues her friendship with her childhood companion, Jacob Black. He is her new moon. Not her sun, but still a light to show her the way.

As many have noted, a new moon is a time of reflection and introspection. There is much of that in this chapter in Bella’s journey. The problem of course is that the light of Jacob’s moon shows her the truth: she loves Edward much more than she loves Jacob.

Bella spends her time with him, envisioning her life with him instead of Edward. She gets to know his tribe, his family and the legends that surround them, including that of their werewolf ancestry. In many ways, being with Jacob is the safer, easier option. They’ve known each other for years. She could be a normal human with a fairly standard life if she were to choose him.

But at the same time, there are still dangers. She sees the damage that Sam Uley caused to Emily in a fit of rage and learns there is always a risk in love. Her lesson is the theme of this book:

Love is always a risk, but the danger must be accepted or the love lost.

Eclipse

Once the third book in the installment opens, Edward and Bella are talking marriage. Edward is committed to marrying her. And Bella now knows that Edward is her only love, but she’s reluctant to marry him when she’s so young. Regardless, she wants him to transition her into a vampire to stop her from aging, something that he views as the destruction of her soul.

There are a couple of things going on in this book. The first, of course, is the surface competition between Edward and Jacob. Jacob knows that he has lost, but he’s fighting for one more chance to prove to Bella that he’s the one who’s right for her. Meanwhile, Edward knows that he has won, but he’s fighting to win Bella as his fiancée. Thus many will argue that the title refers to Edward eclipsing Jacob as the future man in Bella’s life.

And that’s true in part…but to a lesser extent.

What’s really happening in this book/movie is a comparison of Bella’s human life with a future, possible vampire one. The story begins with the transformation of Riley Biers by Victoria, Bella’s adversary. Riley goes on to live a tragic existence, used, manipulated and then thrown away after spending all of his vampiric life dwelling in dark corners of the streets of Seattle.

Meanwhile, Bella visits her mother in Florida and, while there, realizes that the sun-soaked pleasure will never be hers if she transitions into a vampire. She then graduates from high school and celebrates with her classmates at the Cullens’ home – a very positive, human moment. In these scenes, Bella is faced with the extremity of what she will lose if she continues with Edward.

Later they stage the battle and Bella camps out on the mountain. As a human, she nearly freezes to death in the cold. This is a complex scene. It shows Bella her vulnerability as a human and the gain that would be hers as a vampire. However, it’s Jacob who is able to make her warm and safe, which presents the opposing side of the argument.

At the heart of this is an argument for and against losing her mortality for the sake of an eternity as a vampire. In the end, Bella tells Edward that she was always meant to be a vampire; that that’s who she is and where she belongs, whatever the cost. That is the theme of this book.

[For Bella] The gains from being a vampire eclipse the benefits of a human life. [or: It’s better to be who you were meant to be than to try to fit into a normal mold.]

Breaking Dawn

Bella gets married. Ahh…love at last. But there’s a hitch, of course. An unexpected baby. And, once again, Bella is forced to make a decision to either save herself or risk death for someone else; this time, for the sake of her unborn baby.

The movie divides this book into two installments, but it’s really just the story of Bella’s life-death-life journey. She dies, as she postulated in the first book, in the place of someone she loves. But rather than dying for her mother or Edward, as she had expected, it’s this new baby who claims her life.

Edward manages to transition her at the eleventh hour [and fifty-ninth minute] and Bella begins her immortal life as a part of the Cullen clan, as Edward’s wife, and as a mother. It is truly a new dawn for her.

But there’s a problem…the Volturi. They’re back. Not for Bella. No, they love Bella. They want her (and Alice) to join them. Rather, it’s the baby that they want to destroy. Now Bella has to fight again. This time she isn’t fighting to maintain her human life or avoid death. She’s fighting to avoid the destruction of her family.

There are some interesting threads though related to the idea of exposure. Whereas the Cullens would naturally choose to move every few years and flee the exposure that their lack of aging would attract, they find themselves compelled to stay. Now Bella and Edward have to join their lives with her father’s life as a human.

In many ways, this is the dawn that breaks. Rather than hiding in the twilight, concealing themselves, Bella is now stepping out into the dawn and risking unwanted attention for the sake of her family.

I see a couple of themes in this book/ movie:

Family is worth dying for [mortally and eternally]

And:

Vampires and humans [and other creatures like werewolves] can coexist without hiding from one another

Is it Gothic?

Now that we’ve boiled down the segments of this story, it’s fairly easy to see some commonalities. Clearly there’s a theme about risk and a willingness to die for love across all of the series. And also a theme of embracing and not hiding your truest self.

But are these Gothic?

If you’ll recall, a Gothic theme is an irrational one. It deals with spiritual or psychological matters that can’t be known empirically. These themes can’t be reasoned.

It would be hard to argue that any of the themes in the Twilight series are Gothic. Yes, there are vampires and, in a deeper sense, the vampires symbolize the truest self of a person; that self that may not fit in or be accepted by the rest of society. And yes, Bella learns who she is and that she shouldn’t avoid or hide it, regardless of the cost. But is this a deep spiritual question?

I believe that it isn’t.

The matter is a bit harder because this is technically Young Adult fiction. For a group of pre-teens/ teenagers, this concept may lean towards an irrational concept. But by and large, this story is about love and community. About sacrificing oneself for those you value and the gains that come from that. Those are lovely ideas worth pursuing, but they aren’t Gothic.

So, no, though there are things I love about Twilight, I don’t think of it as a Gothic series. But let me know what you think. Did you love the books or hate them? Do you believe they’re Gothic?

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I debated how to title today’s post. In part, I wanted to examine The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (yes, there’s a novel backing that all-famous musical!). That makes this something of a book review. But that’s not entirely my focus. I think you’ll see very quickly that this book opens a lot of questions about whether or not the tale is actually Gothic.

And in that vein, I’d like to discuss what would have made this a much more Gothic tale, along with my current work-in-process, which is based on The Phantom of the Opera, but is very different in many ways.

Beware: Plot Spoilers Ahead!

I love the Phantom of the Opera…the musical. I’ve seen it (or the movie version) or listened to the music many many times. I find myself spontaneously singing songs from the soundtrack on a fairly regular basis. It has a very Gothic feel: the underground caverns; a Phantom whom the musical implies may or may not actually be a person- he may truly be a phantom; the richly baroque setting of the Paris Opera House in the 1880s. It’s a siren-call to Gothic lovers.

Not surprisingly, I wanted to read the book behind the musical. Where the book differs most is with respect to the Phantom’s backstory. In Leroux’s novel, we learn much about Erik, the book’s contemporary villain. He wears the mask – initiated by his mother – to hide a facial disfigurement that he’s had since birth. He’s proficient in many languages and instruments and had lived abroad in Persia, designing a palace for the Shah, before fleeing to Paris. And he’s a murderer, one with a signature: the Punjab Lasso.

All of this is fascinating, but what it does is eliminate some of the mystery behind the Phantom. All of a sudden he’s a particularly maligned and sympathizable man with a difficult and troubling past. This is a two-edged sword and a good learning experience for all writers.

Whereas backstory usually creates a more multi-dimensional villain who’s more believable and, sometimes, more fearsome because of this, it can reduce the very thing that would have made this a truly Gothic story. I’ll show you why.

Gothic or Not?

In this story, other than the ambiance itself, which really just serves to set the scene, the most potentially Gothic element is the Phantom.

Christine Daae is a singer with the opera house, but an ordinary one at best – ordinary even for a professional. Some even think of her as less than professional quality. But when the lead singer, Carlotta, mysteriously falls ill and Christine is placed in the lead role, she brings the house down with her spectacular performance.

This sets off the story – a story of a young Swedish girl (Christine) who desperately loved her father’s fairy tale about an Angel of Music. It isn’t long before we learn the reason for her marked improvement. Behind the scenes, the Phantom, Erik, has taken a liking to her and tells her that he is that same Angel. She believes him and places herself under his tutelage. From that point, she is progressively controlled by him. This escalates until Erik realizes that she intends to run away with another man, Raoul, and instead kidnaps her. He takes her to the underground caverns where he lives.

Thus, a young woman who had nearly lost her love for music, is drawn back into it, shown to be wonderfully talented and ultimately is enslaved by it.

If you’re thinking actively, I think you can see how a Gothic writer could use the character of the Phantom to put forth a very Gothic (aka: irrational) theme. He is a symbol of the music that Christine couldn’t access on her own. He opens a door to her so that she can revel in it and excel. And so that everyone who hears her can see the beauty of the music as well. He’s a key to both the power and the control that music can have over someone. A ghost that speaks, not just to Christine, but to all of us.

The musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber leaves us with just that impression. The book does not.

Why? Because of the backstory. Whereas we usually want our characters – especially the antagonist – to have a rich backstory that readers can glimpse to some extent, in this case, the backstory undermines the Gothic elements.

By giving Erik too much humanity, the symbol of him as an Angel of Music (for good or evil) is largely eliminated. He becomes just a man who’s desperate to be loved. It’s a moving tale from his perspective, but I would have left him a shadowy character, largely unknown, his motives nebulous.

As a side note, if the primary elements contributing to what would have been a Gothic theme had been something other than Erik, this backstory could have worked. By that I mean that, if the story had used something like a hidden portal or a magical score of music that, once discovered, ushered Christine into a new enlightenment about music, the Phantom could have been just a villain. He could have had the elaborate backstory, making him just a well-developed antagonist, and the story would have been Gothic.

However, in the present case, Erik’s humanity overshadows any of the Gothic thematic elements, leaving us with a suspenseful murder/ kidnapping story with a distinctively Gothic ambiance. There’s a lot to like about that…but it doesn’t have the Gothic theme I had hoped to find. At best, it’s very loosely explored and somewhat vague.

My Work-in-Process

I’ve given this story more thought than I otherwise would have because my current manuscript is influenced by the Phantom of the Opera. My story features a young violin prodigy who’s born in the mid-1800s in Vienna. His greatest dream is to be the city and country’s lead violinist, but of course there are obstacles. He quickly understands the extent of his father’s contempt for musicians. And the Conservatory is more political than he – as a child – can initially understand. In addition, there are other brilliant young musicians in Vienna and some of them are the favorites of the board.

His dream seems untenable except for a mysterious stranger who has been following him and who offers to help him…for a price, of course. From that point on, his life vacillates between increasing success and the horrible consequences that come with the actions he takes to gain that success.

The theme I’m exploring is the origin of monstrosity: what brings a person to do evil? Is it something that we already are? Is it a difficult circumstance? Is it a choice?

The point of all of that is that in my book, the music is the vehicle to expose the truth. It isn’t the mysterious stranger per say, although he plays a very dark, inciting role. I can afford to bake in some backstory as to why this person would inject himself into this young boy’s life and why he would become such a malignant catalyst. That backstory won’t make the story any less Gothic because the mysterious stranger isn’t the central symbol that’s supporting the Gothic theme. Rather, I strongly imply (and the story proves) that what happens would have happened regardless of his presence. He just happens to be a tangible representation of the main character’s true nature.

Conclusion

The Phantom of the Opera is a good example of a story that walks the edge between Gothic and non-Gothic writing more so than most. That makes it a bit confusing to understand what kind of story this is. Perhaps the shortest way to say it is: if your antagonist (or other character) is the central Gothic symbol that would prove your Gothic theme, don’t allow backstory, or subplots, or any other element to downplay or overshadow that symbol. It needs all the weight you can give it.

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Gothic Writing & Poison

This struck me as odd. Gothic themes are an exploration of the irrational things such as the spiritual world or psychological occurrences. These types of themes are inherently subtle. They deal with those things that are unseen, that can’t be reasoned or experienced through our senses.

In many ways they’re like poison and should be particularly compatible.

Of course, we aren’t always killing off characters in Gothic literature. Or if we do so, poison may not fit the story particularly well. But currently there’s a disproportionately few number of Gothic tales with any poison.

Why is that?

I have two theories. The first is that writing about poison generally requires a significant amount of knowledge about the science of chemical means of killing, disfiguring or otherwise maiming our fellow man. It’s the kind of knowledge that can run off track, taking the would-be Gothic writer down a scientific trail that’s more technical than most Gothic writers seem to enjoy.

It’s the domain of Mystery or Science Fiction writers who are generally more interested in concrete details. The obvious example is, of course, Agatha Christie, who employed poison quite often. So much so that her use of strychnine was mentioned in the Pharmaceutical Journal and she was accused of providing a handbook to would-be murderers.¹

Writers in general tend to be intuitive thinkers, but if I were to wager a guess, I would say that Mystery and Science Fiction writers most likely contain a disproportionate number of sensors. The sheer presence of so many concrete details lends itself to more of a sensing mind. (And if you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it – it’s a Myers-Briggs thing.)

The point is, poison encompasses so many more technical details than say the use of guns or knives, that it probably appeals to a different type of writer than we’d usually find in the Gothic sphere.

And second, I think that writers have become less enamored of some of the classic poisons. We don’t have cyanide and strychnine lying around the house in the same way that people did a hundred years ago (although it’s present to a lesser extent). And modern forensics can determine exactly what a person ingested so that there’s less mystery involved. That takes away some of the Gothic emphasis on what can’t be proven.

But not entirely.

The Place for Poison

I think you can see that these are somewhat paltry excuses. There may not be strychnine in our modern medicine cabinets, but there’s Diaxinon in the garage, opiates in the bathroom, and lye in our cleaning stash.

And Gothic writers may not be as keen on technical details as those writers in the Mystery or Science Fiction categories, but we’re no strangers to research. We love digging into the details behind our characters’ psychological states (or disorders 😉 or the historical time period in which our story takes place.

Which brings me back to my original assessment: there’s a place for poison in Gothic literature. Before we look at how we can use it most effectively, let’s look at three examples of how it has been used.

Poison in Literature

[Warning: plot spoilers ahead!]

The most striking example of poison in Gothic literature is in We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. I talk about this novella quite a lot, partly because it’s my favorite and partly because it’s one of the most brilliant works of literature, so I’ll keep it short and focused strictly on the poison. As the story opens, we learn that all of the Blackwood family has died by poisoning except for Uncle Julian, who is alive but dying and Merricat and her sister Constance.

Of course it’s Merricat who has killed the entire family. Jackson hints at this from the first paragraph. And the theme – the individual versus the village – requires it. The Blackwood family functions as a microcosm of the greater community in this story – a community that is at odds with those outside of it. Readers have to see the lengths that the individual must go to in order to protect herself from the violent and invasive community. But did it have to be poison?

I’d say, yes. It’s the only weapon that really works. The village isn’t opposed to the individual simply because she’s an individual; the village itself is comprised of a group of individuals. Rather, it’s because the individual as Jackson presents her is someone who doesn’t conform. She can’t be controlled. That lack of conformity means that she’s likely to alter the village, to make it something new, different. She’s a liability to the status quo. She’s something of a poison and needs to use that as a weapon against the kind of control and dominance that the village would like to exert over her.

Nevernight

My next two examples are outside of the Gothic sphere. They’re Dark Fantasy. Nevernight, the first book in the trilogy by Jay Kristoff is technically a Young Adult tale [that borders on Adult literature] about Mia, a young girl who wants to be an assassin of the Red Church so that she can take revenge on the men who destroyed her family. I made a YouTube video about this book that you can find here.

Shock of all shocks, Mia makes it to the school to be trained. Once there, the would-be assassins are trained in everything from combat to seduction to…you guessed it, poison. Mia is quickly set apart as one of the best at understanding the underlying chemistry of poison, at identifying it and predicting how it will react. It’s no surprise when she becomes the leader in this area.

But why poison?

If you’ve read the book, you know that there are several enemies from within. At the beginning of the book, Mia’s father – one of the top members of the Senate – is found guilty of a plot to overthrow the government and is executed. From the perspective of the current establishment, he is an enemy within.

Then Mia joins the Nevernight school. Inexplicable murders happen leading up to Mia’s discovery that there is an enemy within the school – someone who stands with the government and intends to undermine the Red Church.

And of course there’s Mia who comes from one of the prominent government families and yet is now determined to bring down that government. She is also an enemy within.

Each of these is like a poison in the system – for or against one side or the other. Thus, Mia’s interest in and use of poison is perfectly in keeping with the theme and plot of the novel.

The Assassin’s Apprentice

If you like Fantasy and haven’t read The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s amazing. It’s darker than the average Fantasy novel, but so much more nuanced and yet accessible to more readers than some Fantasy might be. (No strange other-world landscapes or inhuman beings in this one.)

Her first book, The Assassin’s Apprentice, introduces us to Fitzchivalry, the royal bastard. In the first book he’s a young boy – spanning the time between when he’s six-years-old and into his teen years – and she identifies something that many of us non-historians have never considered: the liability of a royal bastard.

Since he’s technically of the royal family, Fitz has a rightful claim to be in the line to the throne. That’s a problem for the king. Bastards are by nature something of a poison in the royal family – a liability from within. The best thing to do with a bastard (other than kill them, of course) is to put them to use for the throne. Thus, Fitz is inducted into the world of poisons. He’s put to work apprenticing to be a royal assassin.

I think you can see why poison fits the situation. Instead of allowing Fitz to be a poison for the king, he makes Fitz into one who uses poison to rid the kingdom of the king’s enemies. Perfectly fitting.

How to Use Poison in Your Writing

Now that we’ve covered a few examples of how poison is used (and why it should be), how can we use it in writing? Hopefully these will give you some ideas and get you thinking.

1. A woman is trapped in a toxic work environment in which she is ridiculed and demeaned because she is different from the corporate culture. She’s able to slowly progress in her career due to hard work and results that no one can deny: a significant client who refuses to work with anyone other than her. But as she ascends the corporate ladder, she uncovers an extensive amount of unethical and sometimes even illegal behavior. In one case, the company is cutting corners in global locations so that some of the workers and many of the residents in developing nations are dying due to the poor work conditions and the chemical polluting that the plants are generating. The problem is that the chairman of the board is a long-time friend and golfing partner of the local district attorney and other powerful members of the local government. They are investors in and beneficiaries of the company’s performance. Therefore, they are complicit and willing to turn a blind eye to what the company is doing. The main character finally cracks and quietly begins to poison the leaders of the company, using her own means to do to them what they have been doing to so many others.
2. A young couple has two young children that they now regret. As they’ve discovered a world of power and fame that requires their full attention and devotion, the children have become a liability to their personal goals. They take more and more drastic actions to close the children off from the outside world, to isolate and neglect them so that they have more freedom to pursue their own gains. The oldest, a boy of fourteen, is a clever and enterprising boy who’s obsessed with science. As their parents act more and more aggressively against him and his younger brother, he concocts a plan to retaliate. A plan that involves poison. The children, a poison to the parents’ plans for greatness, will use actual poison to destroy their prisoners.
3. An orphan marries into a family who seem to have everything going for them. They’re the all-American small town family. He’s grateful to be part of the kind of family he never had. Shortly afterwards though, they begin to employ psychological means such as gaslighting to break him down. He discovers that what they really want from him is his genetic matter: they want him to breed with each of their daughters, not just his wife, to produce a family that will be large enough and intelligent enough to take over the power base in their area. Soon he’s a psychological prisoner in their house. As his mind vacillates between lucidity and confusion, he discovers a way to foil their plans. But to do so he has to destroy himself, to make himself into a poison that will kill their daughters and their offspring…along with himself.

Hopefully you can see why each of these marries poison to the theme in the work. That’s what makes poison so effective – when it isn’t used as a random medium, but rather as an extension of the theme so that it’s a natural conclusion.

Let me know if you’re using (or have used) poison in your writing, or if you know of examples that you’ve read and enjoyed!

And, as always, if you enjoyed this post, share it with your friends!

¹ Twilley, N. Agatha Christie and the Golden Age of Poisons. The New Yorker. September 8, 2015. Accessed May 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/agatha-christie-and-the-golden-age-of-poisons

If you want to take your writing from mediocre to good and ultimately to great, you need to do several things. One of these is to write such vivid characters that they stand on their own. The kinds of characters that, as one blogger stated, people Google to see if they’re based on real people. As writers, we know that. We want the amazing people in our heads to come out on the page in full color. But how do we do that?

Now that I’m working on my second book, I’ve been asking myself just that. There’s something about that second book that opens a floodgate of self-doubt and questioning. [I recently learned that it’s not just me…there’s an actual second book phenomenon. But that’s another topic for another day.] I’ve been studying other books and researching ways to take my writing to the next level.

When it comes to characterization, many books and blogs start with things like character interviews. They make an excellent point: we can’t write realistic characters if we don’t know them well enough. I would argue that that’s probably what happens when authors say that their characters ran amuck and took the story in a different direction than they anticipated. Wasn’t it more likely that they didn’t really know who the character were, what they would want and what they would do under pressure? Then, when they put them into the fire, the characters acted in an unexpected way and the writer learned more about who they really are.

However, say that you already have a good handle on what your character believes at the deepest level, what she really, really, really wants – not just at this point in her story, but from life overall, and how she’ll respond to just about any situation. Then how do you show those things on the page???

That’s where I’ve been working lately. The situation is compounded by the fact that my current protagonist’s story spans over thirty years and starts when he’s only four years old. It’s particularly difficult to show a lot of things about a very young child. He’s hardly articulate at this point and has very little personal freedom. Still, I need to show a lot about who he is and how he looks at the world. Particularly since his character is going to change dramatically.

It helps that I read a lot of really good quality literature. I have examples of books in which authors have created incredible characters. And as I study these, I can see at least three different methods that the writers have used to bring these characters to life.

Dialogue

The first is dialogue and by that I don’t mean your run-of-the-mill conversation. If you intend to provide deep characterization using dialogue, it needs to be unique. It needs to stand out as something so individual to your character and in a way that points to the underlying personality of that person.

I’ll show you an example.

If you haven’t read Kelly Mustian’s debut novel, The Girls in the Stilt House, I highly recommend it. It’s very well written, even more so for a first novel. She tells the story of two young women, Ada and Matilda, two characters who are extraordinarily vivid.

Here’s a section of dialogue early in the book in which Ada is discussing her father with Matilda.

[Ada] “He claimed I’m going to have a baby.”

[Matilda] “I heard.”

[Ada] “He had me all mixed up with my mother in his mind, but…” Ada trailed her hand over the bloodstained towel still around her waist, over the tight little bulge that she had thought was nothing more than her stomach knotting up like it always did when she was anxious. “Do you think it could be true?” Ada asked the question of the shadowy girl as if she might still prove to be a heavenly being.

[Matilda] “I think I saved your sorry ass and you ain’t said spit about that, is what I think.”

p. 62

As I mentioned, this is still very early in the story, but readers can already see several things about each of them.

Ada is clearly a very subservient person. She isn’t relying on her own impressions of her body. Rather, she falls back on what her father said. He said that she’s pregnant, so now she questions it. And rather than forming her own opinion of the matter, she turns to Matilda for a second opinion. Ada has no capacity to decide anything for herself. Of course, there’s a good reason for that.

On the other hand, what do we see of Matilda? Her first response is already telling. I heard is an abrupt, seemingly indifferent, bordering on harsh response to another woman who might be pregnant. And after Mustian lays out Ada’s very innocent and helpless perspective, Matilda’s response crosses into the comedic. While Ada is viewing her as a heavenly being who came to help her, Matilda is angry and annoyed at Ada for her flighty nature. She wants her to realize that she’s in a different place than she had been now that Matilda has come into her life.

Matilda clearly has an edge about her, some underlying anger, but she also has a backbone. She has a strength that comes out in bold speech and fearless actions. She doesn’t cower, doesn’t hope for Ada’s gratitude or friendship. Rather she tells her what she thinks with no apology. And we see by her words that Matilda has helped Ada in some way that she was unable to do for herself. [Readers already know how at this point in the book, but I won’t give it away.]

That’s a lot of characterization for a small section of one page. The entire book is like this. In everything that Ada and Matilda say, we see so much about who they are.

Actions

A great example of deep characterization through action is in We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. I mention this book regularly because it’s my favorite Gothic story of all time. Not because of the setting or even the plot itself, although I like those as well. Rather, it’s my favorite because of Merricat, the protagonist and narrator.

Jackson crafts what I believe to be the most interesting character in all of literature in the person of Mary Katherine (“Merricat”) Blackwood. She uses some dialogue, but primarily action to show readers who Merricat really is. The following section [I’ve abbreviated it] shows us what Merricat does when their Cousin Charles moves in and tries to take over the household.

Thursday was my most powerful day. It was the right day to settle with Charles…I went upstairs into our father’s room, walking softly so Constance would not know I was there. The first thing to do was stop our father’s watch which Charles had started…I could not turn it all the way back to where it had formerly been because he had kept it going for two or three days, but I twisted the winding knob backward until there was a small complaining crack from the watch and the ticking stopped. When I was sure that he could never start it ticking again I put it back gently where I had found it…

During the night I had gone out in the darkness and brought in a large basket filled with pieces of wood and broken sticks and leaves and scraps of glass and metal from the field and the wood…While I altered our father’s room I took the books from the desk and blankets from the bed, and I put my glass and metal and wood and sicks and leaves into the empty places…I poured a pitcher of water onto our father’s bed; Charles could not sleep there again. The mirror over the dresser was already smashed; it would not reflect Charles…

pp. 86 – 87

There’s so much more to Merricat, but this shows the early stages of how she tries to deal with the threat of Charles in her and her sister’s life.

Immediately we see something interesting about her. Thursday was my most powerful day is the kind of comment that someone very superstition would say. Jackson follows that statement with descriptions of ritual magic. Merricat is trying to do several things here.

First, she’s practicing ritual magic in an attempt to drive Charles away. She wants his spirit to be restless (he can’t see himself in the mirror that she smashed), he can’t rest in the bed (that she destroyed), he can’t gain any sense of time and place (since she stopped the watch).

Second, she’s trying to restore her life and that of her sister, to what it was before Charles came. She makes the statement [to herself] that she can’t put the watch back to where it had been because he’s been running it for two or three days. We see more evidence of this throughout the rest of the book. Merricat is trying to board up their castle so that no one can come in and alter the lives that she and Constance have there.

Whether you love her or hate her, this is an example of a character who is so real that she jumps off of the page. It’s her unique [and often sympathizable] actions that set her apart from every other character in every other story.

Inner Thoughts

If you want to study deep characterization, you couldn’t do any better than to study the works of Ray Bradbury. He’s a master. His coming-of-age story, Dandelion Wine is an example of that.

The book tells the story of a summer in 1928 in the life of a twelve-year-old boy, Douglas Spaulding. Like Jackson, Bradbury also uses dialogue and action in brilliant ways, but here’s an example in which Douglas has gone with his father and brother to pick wild grapes in the woods. His brother is trying to talk to him while Doug is lost in deep reflection.

No! Douglas squeezed his mind shut. No!…And at last, slowly, afraid he would find nothing, Douglas opened one eye.

And everything, absolutely everything, was there.

The world, like a great iris of an even more gigantic eye, which has also just opened and stretched out to encompass everything, stared back at him.

And he knew what it was that had leaped upon him to stay and would not run away now.

I’m alive, he thought.

His fingers trembled, bright with blood, like the bits of a strange flag now found and before unseen, and him wondering what country and what allegiance he owed to it…

The grass whispered under his body. He put his arm down, feeling the sheath of fuzz on it, and, far away, below, his toes creaking in his shoes. The wind sighed over his shelled ears. The world slipped bright over the glassy round of his eyeballs like images sparked in a crystal sphere…

I’m really alive! he thought. I never knew it before, or if I did I don’t remember!

pp. 9-10

Oh, Bradbury. I love, love, love his style of writing. It’s so full of description and metaphor. I cut out a lot here for the sake of time, but readers see so much of Douglas in this short section.

He’s clearly one of those young boys who is full of life, so full of life that he can hardly contain it. And he has a depth of perception that’s rare, even in adults. In this book, Bradbury explains it as a coming-of-age phenomenon. Douglas is coming into an awareness of the world and his own presence in it that marks a crossing of a threshold: into that gray state between childhood and adulthood. But in reality, Douglas is reflecting on things that few people probably consider.

Lastly, we see a powerful ability to connect with his imagination. Douglas is using his imagination in ways that, rather than escaping reality, help him to understand it more clearly. All of this paints a picture of a very likeable and unique young boy. He isn’t just picking grapes with his family, or enjoying the feeling of the grass between his body. He’s reflecting on his role and place in creation. He’s experiencing his own strength and the possibilities that he possesses because he’s alive, he has a body, he can move through the world exploring it and understanding himself more clearly.

Bradbury gives us this because Douglas’s inner thoughts are vivid and descriptive in a way that tell us who this character is.

What Should You Do?

Ideally we should use as many of these as possible as we write. We can use every bit of dialogue, action and inner thoughts to show readers a clearer picture of our characters. But sometimes it isn’t possible.

Sometimes your character is alone. Sometimes, as in my book, the character is very young and has a personality that’s not particularly expressive. In that case, inner thoughts are where we should focus our attention.

Sometimes the character is in prison, or in some other way incapacitated. We can use their inner thoughts, but we can also use dialogue in very creative ways.

Sometimes the character is in a relationship or situation in which there’s no longer a place for words. Then actions should take center stage.

The key is to use whatever we can, all when possible, to craft something that says more than simply what’s happening with the plot. Our readers want to see what sets these characters apart, what makes them different from the characters in any other story!

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If there’s one genre I almost never read, it’s young adult. I don’t like it. The quality and depth of the writing (or lack thereof) just doesn’t appeal to me. There are books for young people that I love, like Something Wicked This Way Comes, or books featuring young protagonists, like Summer of Night, but they aren’t technically young adult literature. That said, there are always exceptions and I’ve found one in Erin A. Craig’s novel, House of Salt and Sorrows.

Even though it’s marketed as a Young Adult novel, I picked up the book because it’s touted as a Gothic tale and has received a lot of positive reviews. I figured I’d give it a try and I was very pleasantly surprised.

Note: I’m going to avoid plot spoilers, so feel free to keep reading. It won’t ruin the story!

World-Building

The world building in this tale is easily one of the most impressive aspects of the story. It’s definitely a fantasy tale and yet it is solidly grounded in a world to which readers can relate. Craig’s world is comprised of a series of islands with a comprehensive history of religious and magical beliefs. She demonstrates an ability to construct a world that feels truly real with a delicate balance between attention given to description versus plot.

As an example of her world, at the very beginning of the story, Annaleigh attends a funeral for her most-recently deceased sister, Eulalie. The High Mariner – a form of ocean-faring priest – places the thin coffin in a crypt where it won’t be long before the the salt water river that runs beneath the crypt will eat away at the bottom of the coffin. When it goes, the body is released and carried back out to the Salt. The people of her island are the People of the Salt and view themselves as belonging to the sea.

That sort of originality pervades the novel and fits into an extensive system that readers will long to experience for themselves.

Characters

Annaleigh and her sisters are interesting in ways that I enjoyed. They’re loving towards one another and yet fierce and opinionated when necessary. Their father is also uniquely believable – both devoted to his daughters and yet self-centered and impatient with them.

None of the characters are written with the level of depth and complexity that you’d expect in a very high-quality adult book. However, none of them are predictable and are a step above the typical writing in young adult fiction.

Is it Gothic?

But is the book Gothic? The question is both easier and harder to answer than usual. The challenge lies in understanding the expectations in Young Adult fiction.

Gothic fiction is Gothic because it puts forward an irrational theme: something generally psychological or spiritual that cannot be proved through reason or the five senses. This is notably missing from this novel, so at a purely objective level I would not call this story Gothic.

However, Young Adult novels are notoriously weak with respect to theme. Young Adult readers and writers will probably disagree with that, but if they were to study books such as Something Wicked This Way Comes or Carrion Comfort in which every part of the story contributes to a thematic proof, the differences would be readily apparent.

That said, the expectations for Young Adult fiction are different. Given that, Craig manages to craft a story with a number of dark twists and elements that will appeal to those who like both Gothic and Young Adult literature. Of course, I can’t tell you what most of these are, as it would give the story away!

Conclusion

Though I wouldn’t call this a Gothic novel, for a Young Adult story, the world building and plot complexities were impressive. If you like YA fiction, particularly with a darker note to it, you will love this story. Even if you don’t it’s worth a read. Craig is a good writer and her work is worth experiencing.

There’s a fragile space between the known and the unknown in which things that we expect are no longer what we know them to be. It’s that space that we term the uncanny. It’s hard to define and yet it holds such power to unsettle us as readers. Or to influence our readers if we’re writers. But how do we make sense of it? How do we recognize it? And how do we write it?

I asked myself these very questions sometime last year as I was reading an article that Freud wrote on the uncanny. Shortly afterwards, I picked up a copy of Sarah Waters’s book The Little Stranger, not realizing that it’s practically a study in that very subject.

The Uncanny: What is It?

But first, what do we mean when we talk about something being uncanny?

If you read Freud’s article that I referenced above, you will come away with two impressions. First, that any attempt to define the uncanny is woefully insufficient. But second, that we can use several examples to attempt to gain some level of understanding. At least at a surface level. That’s what I’ll do here, so keep in mind that we could go to much greater philosophical depths, but I doubt that they would help us in what we intend to achieve as readers/writers.

That said, let’s start here: the uncanny is something that leaves people feeling frightened and unsettled. That’s important – unsettled is different from just plain frightened. An intruder in your house at three in the morning is frightening; a grizzly wandering past your isolated tent while you’re sleeping (or attempting to) is frightening; a car accident near a steep precipice is frightening. None of these are unsettling, at least not in the way that the uncanny is.

Because something that is uncanny crosses over from what we know to be normal and everyday into what is supposed to be impossible. For example, déjà vu. Imagine that you go about your day, you leave the house, make a few errands, see a friend for lunch and then, as you’re leaving the restaurant, walking back to your car, you freeze. You suddenly have the sense that everything that you’ve experienced today has happened to you before. Not in some vague sense that you’ve eaten at that place before, with that person, but every single thing.

Every car you passed, every person on the street, every word that you spoke and that you overheard…you realize that every single thing about today is a repeat from some prior day.

That’s creepy. Very, very creepy. And it’s uncanny.

Or consider this: you take a vacation at your family’s cottage on a rocky coast with only a small village within an hour’s driving distance. It’s a stormy late autumn and you’re content to spend the time reading and working on creative projects. After a few days though, you notice something strange. When you make tea and come back to your chair, your book is moved. When you go up to bed in the evening, the lamp has fallen on the floor. When you come down to breakfast in the morning, a plate flies across the room and crashes into the wall beside your head.

The doors are still locked. The windows are secure. There are no wet footprints in the house, which there would be if someone had come in out of the storm. There’s nothing. No sign of anything natural to explain these incidents. [Assume that there’s NO explicable reason for these, such as some prankster who’s been hiding in the house since you arrived.]

Those are three escalating examples of the uncanny. Notice that each one involves something that should never happen in the natural world: inanimate objects becoming animate. In the first example something just seems different. You know you left the book somewhere else. In the second, you know that something has happened. Lamps don’t fall of their own accord. And in the third, you witness something beyond reason: a plate that chooses to violently attack you.

I think of the uncanny as a bridge between our world and another. An experience that can’t be explained by any natural means and which isn’t a mystery to be solved. When objects move on their own, or animals or plants do things that they shouldn’t or wouldn’t ever do, or we suddenly sense that our experience of reality is not what we know it to be, that’s the uncanny.

Note that these phenomena are also all intensely psychological. They cause us to question our own sanity. They suggest that our perception is coming unhinged. Even if it isn’t. Even if there’s some reason for these things – most likely a reason we’ll never understand in this world – and it’s not an issue of our mental acuity, the uncanny leaves our minds shaken. Unsettled.

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Beware: Plot Spoilers Ahead

[In order to discuss the uncanny in this book, I have to lay out what the little stranger is along with some other elements behind the story. I don’t think this actually spoils the plot as the book isn’t really meant to be a mystery to be solved. For me it makes the story more interesting. I can dig deeper as I read now that I know where Waters is going with this.

However, if that would spoil the plot for you, you’ll want to read the book first and come back to this post!]

The book centers on a young woman, Caroline Ayres, who lives in her family’s estate in England with her brother and aging mother. When their family doctor is unavailable in the midst of a perceived crisis, they call in a new young doctor, Dr. Faraday, to aid them. This ushers in his presence for the duration of the story, a story that is told from his perspective.

Shortly afterwards, strange things begin to happen. Caroline’s dog, a mild mannered, lovable retriever, attacks a young girl without provocation. Caroline’s brother, Roderick, begins to sequester himself, claiming that there’s a curse on the house. Fires begin spontaneously, voices speak through tubes in the walls when no one is on the other end, clocks throw themselves across the room, objects are no longer where they once were.

For a time these incidents are explained away. The dog must have been startled when no one was looking. Roderick must be progressively losing his mind and either claiming things that are false, or doing them himself. But as the story goes on, the explanations fail. More and more incidents occur without Roderick and and when everyone else’s actions are accounted for. Eventually, readers are left stumped with the sense that there’s no natural explanation for anything. And yet this is clearly no ghost story.

At least not traditionally.

The key to the mystery is found later in the book (around the three-quarter point, of course!). At that point, Dr. Faraday is discussing the strange happenings at Hundreds Hall with a colleague of his, Dr. Seeley. Seeley is not as surprised as Faraday had expected and instead tells him,

The subliminal mind has many dark, unhappy corners, after all. Imagine something loosening itself from one of those corners. Let’s call it a – a germ. And let’s say conditions prove right for that germ to develop – to grow, like a child in the womb. What would this little stranger grow into? A sort of shadow-self, perhaps: a Caliban, a Mr. Hyde. A creature motivated by all the nasty impulses and hungers the conscious mind had hoped to keep hidden way: things like envy, and malice, and frustration…

p. 389

In other words, the little stranger is a manifestation of the character’s darkest impulses, his unconscious nature given an invisible form that can wreak havoc as a means of acting out against those who have frustrated his designs.

There’s only one character in this book who covets something very badly, who wants to finally have and be and do all of the things that his station in life have prevented him from having or being or doing. Dr. Faraday.

He covets Hundreds Hall, an aptly-named estate that represents the money and social standing to which his family isn’t privy.

Waters handles this brilliantly. I don’t remember her ever overtly stating such a thing and yet it lies just beneath the surface throughout the story. We know that Faraday is greedy and jealous even though we never see him act on it. We know that his intentions in seeking to marry Caroline – a marriage that would be unthinkable under normal circumstances – are self-serving and underhanded though he never shows his hand.

Even Dr. Faraday seems oblivious to his own character, a fact that’s revealed at this point in Dr. Seeley’s insight that Faraday doesn’t anticipate. It’s a little stranger – one whom even the character from whom it emanates doesn’t recognize.

Thus, it would be fair to say that Waters has given a psychological/ spiritual character to the uncanny in this story. This shadow version of Dr. Faraday is able to provoke the dog to bite and set fire to Roderick’s rooms and torment Caroline in the middle of the night. It prowls around acting out against the things that frustrate him and attempting to turn his circumstances to his advantage.

In that way, the uncanny has an explanation and yet it’s a reasoning that still leaves us deeply unsettled. It opens doors to all sorts of further implications with their own unsettling ends. In that way, Waters has handled the subject adeptly, leaving even her explanation…uncanny.

Writing the Uncanny

If you want to write the uncanny, it’s something of a tight-rope walk. Objects, animals, even events have to act in subtly abnormal ways, things that we can’t explain. But we can’t take it too far. Too far one way and there’s a ghost or paranormal explanation. Too far another way and we’re in a fantasy tale in which the world functions differently. Too far in a different direction and it’s psychological suspense with characters entrenched in mental illness. Any one of these makes for a great story, but none of them are uncanny.

To write the uncanny, you have to be comfortable with walking a fine line between events that fit together for a reason and events that have no logical explanation. It’s a tough task, but impressive when it’s well executed as it is in The Little Stranger.

If you know of other instances of the uncanny, or you’re interested in writing some of your own, let me know! I’d love to hear about it.

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I’m back. After a couple of weeks of household projects and family visiting, I’ve returned to my keyboard and to peace and quiet. We had a wonderful visit, but it’s still nice to get back to my quasi-routine.

In that spirit, I thought it would be a wonderful time to talk about isolation in Gothic literature. Because isolation is a two-sided trope. We often speak of it in terms of danger or the protagonist’s inability to connect with others or find help in his or her situation. But of course there’s another aspect to isolation – the ability to take a deeper look at the things that can go unnoticed when we’re surrounded by distractions.

Gothic writing often uses any or all of these.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

The first example is Dracula by Bram Stoker. In the book, Jonathan Harker, an attorney, travels to Transylvania to aid Count Dracula in his acquisition of property in England and, while there, discovers that Dracula and the three women he keeps in his castle are all vampires.

If you’ve read the novel, it may surprise you that I chose that book as an example of isolation. After all, once Jonathan returns home to his beloved Mina and his friends, they band together to battle Dracula’s malevolent purposes. But if you look at the theme, Jonathan’s time alone in Dracula’s castle carries special weight.

Some (including myself) have argued that Stoker’s main purpose in writing this tale was to highlight the West’s fear of the flood of Eastern people who were migrating to England. I see this in the requirement Stoker established that vampires cannot rest apart from their native soil. In order for Dracula to move to England, he has to bring coffins full of soil from Transylvania. It’s easy to see that this “native soil” would be the Eastern culture that would potentially alter England.

To heighten this further, once he arrives in England, the vampire, Dracula, begins to feed off of the blood of the English people. Which could easily represent the danger to and destruction of the West.

Third, to make matters worse, Dracula’s victims of choice are the two females in the novel – the ones whom the English men are most concerned about protecting. In the end, it’s only a band of English men, warring against this Eastern force, that defeats it. And it’s at great cost. They lose the life of one of their one. It’s possible that these women represent England, a nation that can only be preserved unaltered if valiant men rise up and sacrifice themselves to save her.

In order for Jonathan to feel and exemplify this fear, he has to spend the first part of the book alone. Trapped and isolated in Count Dracula’s castle, the reader sees and feels the power of this Eastern force and the reason for the Englishman’s fear. He’s one man surrounded by forces that he cannot stop, against which he has no defenses. Sure, once he’s home with his band of noble allies, they can wage a battle against this foe. But first the readers have to see what they’re up against. Stoker exaggerates this well through the use of isolation.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre is another great example of the use of isolation in Gothic writing. Though she is rarely alone physically, she spends the majority of the book emotionally isolated from the other characters. That’s important to note: isolation doesn’t have to be a physical separation from other characters.

As a child, Jane is at odds with her aunt and cousins who dislike her and resent her presence in their home. When her aunt ships her off to Lowood Hall, Jane finds a temporary friendship with another girl, Helen Burns, and with one of the teachers, Miss Temple. However, overall, the harsh and inhumane conditions at the boarding school leave her largely isolated.

When she takes a position as a governess at Thornfield Hall, she finds herself in close proximity with the strangely captivating Mr. Rochester. He and Jane develop something of a friendship, but Brontë still crafts their encounters in such a way that readers understand that Rochester’s life and Jane’s are worlds apart. This is made abundantly clear when Blanche Ingram and company visit. Though Jane is invited to sit in the drawing room while they play music, sing and visit with one another, she is relegated to the periphery – an observer, not a participant in their circle.

Then comes the heartbreaking plot twist when Jane learns something that she cannot in good conscience disregard. She flees and is, for the first time in the book, truly isolated – emotionally and physically. Shortly afterwards she finds a family, but this time of total isolation is critical.

At that point in the book, Jane has found everything that she finally hoped to have in life: a place and a people where she is at home, where she belongs. But it would cost her everything she stands for and in which she believes. In other words, she would have to sacrifice herself and the things that matter most to her in order to have it.

She rejects it and chooses to honor her values, but of course it’s a painful decision imbued with a sense of great loss. Thus, the heightened isolation that follows this decision parallels her spiritual and psychological state. She believes that she lost every hope that she had. After this brief and intense period, she emerges stronger and better. It’s as if a weaker form of Jane died in order to give birth to a new woman of strength and virtue. And with that, she finally finds the belonging that she desperately wanted.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a strange novel in many ways, but with a thought-provoking message. Because the story is told through a series of letters, the reader has the sense that Dr. Jekyll lives in a perpetual state of isolation. We know that that can’t be the case and yet it’s all that Stevenson gives us. I believe that that is intentional.

This is an intensely spiritual book. In it Dr. Jekyll is warring within himself. Part of him longs to indulge his darkest longings. The other part wants to retain his moral, upstanding nature. For a time he believes that he can have both, that he can be Mr. Hyde (his dark self) by night and still return to his virtuous self as Dr. Jekyll by day. Of course, one of the two prevails in the end, proving out Stevenson’s theory that it’s impossible for a person to pursue both good and evil. I’ll let you guess which one wins.

The point though is that Dr. Jekyll’s isolation is actually a positive and necessary thing. There’s no one who can help a person wade through such an examination. It’s a very personal, introspective journey. The fact that Stevenson portrayed the character in such an isolated state mirrors and enables what’s going on within him. No spiritual deep-dive is a group exercise.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

If you’ve followed my writing for long, you know that this one is my favorite Gothic works of all time. Sadly, it’s only a novella, but it’s chalk full of depth. And isolation is absolutely essential – central even – to the plot and the underlying meaning of this book.

In the story, sisters Merricat and Constance Blackwood live a secluded life with their dying Uncle Julian. Unlike in some Gothic stories, the Blackwood sisters have chosen isolation. This is consistent with the theme which explores the idea that the collective, the village, is and always will be at odds with the individual (those who aren’t part of the collective).

As the story progresses, Merricat takes increasingly desperate measures to seal up their castle against any outside forces. At face value she is a fantastically odd character, but it’s really Merricat who understands the theme and is willing to do whatever it takes to protect herself and her sister from outsiders.

If you agree with Jackson’s theme, you would view isolation as a positive and logical choice for any individual, and would pursue it as she did.

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

My last example may seem to be another surprising choice. After all, Louis de Pointe du Lac is also rarely physically alone. He is converted to a vampire by Lestat early in the book and is with him, in a love-hate relationship for much of the story.

But Rice uses Louis to explore a spiritual theme of redemption. As he navigates his new nature as a being that must kill in order to survive, Louis questions the state of his soul: whether he belongs to God (if He exists, about which Louis is uncertain) or Satan; and whether he is beyond redemption. Thus, it makes sense that Louis feels very emotionally isolated throughout the book.

Lestat is unable to answer his questions and doesn’t care to do so. Instead he treats Louis disdainfully as one who bothers with irrelevant minutiae. In a moment of weakness, Louis brings home a young girl, Claudia, whose mother has died. The two transform her into a vampire and she acts as a destructive force in their lives, albeit one with whom readers sympathize. Claudia is Louis’s attempt to find a counterbalance to his murderous tendencies. He wants to love her. And she loves him in return…for a time.

In the end though, it is Claudia’s effect that drives a wedge between the two of them and sets them at odds in irreparable ways. Ultimately, Louis is still emotionally, and in the end, physically, isolated from all others.

As with We Have Always Lived in the Castle, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, this isolation is crucial to the spiritual and psychological theme that Rice is pursuing. Louis’s journey is an inward one, one that only he can take.

Conclusion

Of course, there are ways in which the use of isolation in each of these cases makes the protagonist’s case more desperate. Jane Eyre has no help in her impoverished state, no way out of the abuse of her relatives or the Lowood School. Louis is pitted against what he perceives as a monster in Lestat and, given his unique, vampiric nature, he has no one to turn to. The same could be said for the Blackwood sisters who are victims of the mean-spirited villagers, Dr. Jekyll who, cannot escape himself, or Jonathan Harker who, for a time, is one solitary man against a castle of unassailable foes.

But simultaneously, the isolation in these books plays the introspective roles that we just discussed. And as with any Gothic trope, this one exists to make a very irrational theme clearer.

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The book features two young boys on the cusp of their fourteenth birthday. Will Halloway longs for goodness and light, the hallowed way, as his name indicates. His best friend, Jim Nightshade is attracted to the things of darkness. Evil entices him and he answers its call. So when a strange carnival comes to town late in October, it sets his sights on Jim. Will soon finds himself in a battle to keep Jim from falling into the deadly snare of the carnival leader, Mr. Dark.

In addition to the young boys, Will’s father, Charles Halloway plays a central part. In many ways he is the pivotal character. He is the one caught in middle age, feeling the weight of his sense that most of his life is lost, that nothing is left for him. Little does he know that he’s up for the fight of his life, a fight that will either set him on a different path all together or take everything from him. And it’s through Charles that we see Bradbury voice the theme most overtly.

What is it about?

On the surface, the book deals with a clear good versus evil theme. Linked to this is an exploration of temptation and sin and the extent to which evil imprisons people. That is, of course, how Mr. Dark, the Illustrated Man, captures his victims. Their sins and the weight of their sadness in life – a sadness that Bradbury links with a loss of innocence – make them vulnerable to the carnival leader. When he gathers them they are transformed into horrific caricatures of their own sin.

But deeper than these, the book focuses on the fear of death. Mr. Dark stokes this fear by luring people into a magical maze of mirrors. There they see themselves in the future at their weakest.

[The reflections of Will’s father] were so old, so very old, and got much older the farther away they marched, wildly gesticulating, as Dad threw up his hands to fend off the revelation, this wild image repeated to insanity.

p. 230

This shocking sight drives many to pursue Mr. Dark’s carousel, a magical instrument of time travel. There, a person can travel either forward one year of their life for each revolution, or backwards one year at a time. Miss Foley, the boys’ teacher falls prey to the mirrors and agrees to travel backwards on the carousel. But when she’s left stranded and helpless as a very young girl, she discovers that youth wasn’t what she really wanted.

…me…me…help me…nobody’ll help me…me…I don’t like this…

p. 145

Of course, Will and Jim have no desire to recover the youth that they still possess. Rather, it’s Jim who knows too much, who peeps in windows at intimate couples, who longs to grow older and take all that he longs to experience.

But Jim, now, he knows [why bad things happen], he watches for it happening, he sees it start, he sees it finish, he licks the wound he expected, and never asks why: he knows. He always knew.

p. 17

Bradbury contrasts Jim with Will who has a natural innocence, who’s “the last peach, high on a summer tree.” (p. 16) It’s that purity that will cause Will to question evil, to not understand it. Because he stands so far apart from it, he doesn’t anticipate its impact on him and then suffers more from its blow. But not Jim. Jim knows evil. He longs for it, anticipates it even. And so he is drawn to it, and it to him.

Apart from both of these is Will’s father, Charles Halloway. As a fifty-year-old man, he represents a loss of innocence, but also a human’s natural fear of death as he draws closer to the inevitable. So it is Charles who is poised to make the choices that will either save them all or leave them prisoners of Mr. Dark.

I appreciate the name that Bradbury chose for his principle antagonist: Mr. Dark. It parallels the theme brilliantly, a theme that Charles states in this way:

I think [the carnival] uses Death as a threat. Death doesn’t exist. It never did, it never will….All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing. And the carnival wisely knows we’re more afraid of Nothing than we are of Something. You can fight Something. But… Nothing? Where do you hit it?

p.186-187

I don’t necessarily agree with Bradbury’s idea about death and implicitly, an afterlife, but Mr. Dark brilliantly encapsulates this fear that the carnival uses to prey on people.

I’ll leave it to you to read the book and discover how Charles and Will face this threat and whether or not they defeat it. But I think it’s safe to say that this is clearly a Gothic theme. It’s a very spiritual question – one that deals with the spirit of man itself and its mortality or immortality along with how we should address our own fear of death.

Gothic Tropes

The tropes themselves are many. Bradbury uses a lightning rod salesman who tries to give Jim a rod to stave off the attraction to evil that he knows is approaching in the coming storm, a man who can’t stave off his own attraction to that same evil. He uses a Gypsy Dust who “lived always tomorrow and let today slide…and so wound up penalized, having to guess other people’s wild sunrises and sunsets.” (p. 189) He uses Mr. Dark, the Illustrated Man, whose body is covered in the faces of those he has destroyed, a personification of Death.

And of course he uses the carnival itself, which is the arena where we expose our perspective of death. Those who are young and innocent, like Will, go to the carnival to laugh at the absurdity of things like the hall of mirrors. They don’t give it more weight than it is due. Those who have a knowledge of evil, like Jim and Charles, see in the carnival either the allure of evil or their own fear of death – that Nothing that looms ahead of us all.

Each of these, and so many other characters in the book, exemplifies Bradbury’s exploration of the fear of death and how that should and could be combated.

I loved this book. I’m shocked that I haven’t read it to date. If you haven’t picked it up, I highly recommend it. If you have, let me know what you thought of it. What did or didn’t appeal to you?

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If we’re being terribly honest, I have a love-hate relationship with werewolves. I want to love them, but sometimes I don’t. I pick up werewolf movies and am usually disappointed. Not always, but usually. They tend to come across as cheesy, awkward, and one-sided. Unlike vampires, who’ve cornered the market on cool, werewolves are pretty much left out of the game.

And werewolves are rarely featured in any literature, especially Gothic writing, probably for that very reason. As writers, we don’t want our characters to be so unsexy. But I don’t think they have to be. (That’s the love part of my love-hate relationship speaking.) I think werewolves could be really, really cool. So much so that I have a werewolf trilogy (and so much more) in the planning stage right now.

Which got me thinking about what’s wrong with the standard werewolf portrayal and what could be done about it to make werewolves an important character trope in Gothic writing.

Werewolves in Literature

It may surprise you to hear that there are werewolves in adult Gothic literature.

English writer, Colin Wilson argued that Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) was really a werewolf story at a subtextual level. In addition, Alexander Dumas wrote a fantasy story, The Wolf Leader. The tale is about a mistreated shoe-keeper who makes a deal with a werewolf who promises him vengeance at a cost to himself. Guy Endore wrote The Werewolf of Paris (1933) about a sadistic man – the child of a rape – who flees his past and takes up with the Franco-Prussian war where he finds love. But of course, he can’t outrun who he really is.

There have also been medieval stories about werewolves who were under the spell of some dark magic, and numerous werewolf short stories or tales such as some of the Weird Tales in pulp magazines in the mid-twentieth century.

In recent years, werewolves played central roles in young-adult fiction such as the Twilight series and The Vampire Diaries. There was also a recent book, The Wolfman by Nicholas Pekearo [not to be confused with the movie or the screenplay by Curt Siodmak] about a dishonorably discharged Vietnam veteran turned vigilante werewolf. And last but certainly not least, Anne Rice wrote The Wolf Gift about a young man who’s bitten and then discovers both a hidden society of those like himself and a life that shows him a richer, fuller path than he had previously known.

The Hidden Wolf

But aside from movies and the two young adult examples above, it seems like werewolf literature is both rare and largely unknown. However, there are numerous examples of man-wolf relationships in literature that have been widely and wildly popular. But their nature has been veiled. They may be werewolves of a sort, but the truth of the matter is generally not overtly stated.

The Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb is a wonderful example. If you like Fantasy, especially Fantasy of the darker sort (although not that much so by today’s standards), you’ll want to read this trilogy and the subsequent books. In The Farseer Trilogy, the protagonist, Fitzchivalry, takes up with a wolf as a young boy. The two become inseparable and form something of a soul-bond. Over time, Fitz learns how to enter the mind/soul of his wolf and travel with him as he hunts in the night. Though he’s not presented as a werewolf and they don’t hunt people, we could easily argue that Fitz is a werewolf.

A similar case could be made for Bran Stark in Game of Thrones. He and his direwolf, Summer, are so close that he is able to enter into her mind and run with her through the mountains and forests – a great relief for him after he is left paralzyed.

How about Wolverine? He’s obviously not a werewolf, or even a wolf for that matter, but the X-Men character bears a striking resemblance to werewolf characters. We could easily swap out his wolverine name and he could have been written as a wolf.

And then there’s the classic fairytale, Little Red Riding Hood. The original book leaves the wolf at face value. But the 2011 film by Catherine Hardwicke played on the subtext in the fairytale, making the wolf a man who walks as a wolf by the full moon.

None of these examples use the explicit term, werewolf, but it’s hardly a stretch to see the wolf/ man for what he is. And all of these are immensely successful. Which should cause us to stop and ask why it is that the popularity of the werewolf is so great in these cases and not in others. It can’t be that merely the omission of the word werewolf results in the success. Rather I think it’s something else entirely.

How To Write a Successful Werewolf

In each of these successful cases, particularly the first two, which give us more content to analyze than simply a two-hour movie would provide, the werewolf is a man first and a wolf second.

It sounds simple, basic even, but a werewolf has a relatively limited capacity to do anything but run through the wild and hunt. He can’t blend into and participate in society as a vampire can. He’s a wolf. He can’t even appear to be normal while actually being an outsider. He’s distinctly other.

Many werewolf stories and movies that I’ve seen focus so much on the man (or woman) in the werewolf state that the story grows stale. A couple of runs through the forest and the wolf’s adventures are no longer interesting. It’s a character’s interactions with others and his pursuit of his goals (other than the next rabbit) that makes him interesting.

Stephenie Meyer handled this fairly well in the Twilight series. Jacob Black and the other Quillayute tribe wolves have a distinct community, with conflict and alternate storylines. They’re interesting. Notice also that they aren’t in their wolf state terribly often. More so than Bran’s warg abilities or Fitz’s wolf travels, but still not to enough to dominant the character’s actions. Jacob’s primary interactions are with Bella and his love for her, or with his family and his conflicted loyalty to them.

That’s lesson #1 – make sure that the werewolf part of your character’s identity is less, if not significantly less, dominant than the rest of his doings. He (or she) needs to be a person in relationships, trying to accomplish his goals first, and a werewolf second.

I can see one other distinct difference between the successful and the unsuccessful werewolf character: complexity. We say that often as writers, but for some reason when it comes to werewolves, writers seem to fall back on the clichéd standards. By that I mean that they use the werewolf as a symbol for anger or overly aggressive masculinity. And that’s it.

That’s certainly the case in The Vampire Diaries. Tyler is prone to anger, as was his father. And both of them are werewolves. We didn’t get to see as much of his character as we do of the others. Even though it was a television show about vampires, we saw plenty of Bonnie Bennett and other supernatural characters in the show. But Tyler’s character grew stale relatively quickly. Because he was just angry. He didn’t have enough complexity to give him a more central role.

Consider again our successful examples from above.

• Fitz isn’t angry at all – not as a general rule. Rather, he’s a very curious and somewhat introspective young boy (and later, man) who’s caught between his royal relatives and his own status as a bastard (a threat to the throne). Thus, it’s not surprising that the throne quickly puts him to use as a royal assassin, sent out to dispose of their enemies. He’s in love with a young girl. He’s loyal to his mentor and later to his close friend, The Fool.
• Bran is an adventurous young boy who’s in the wrong place at the wrong place and is left paralyzed as a result. He has something like prophetic abilities as a greenseer and can see the past, present and future. He’s brave and strong, not bitter or vengeful.
• Wolverine is the most stereotypical of our wolf-like examples. He majors in extreme masculinity, embracing danger and thrills with no fear. And he certainly does have a hard edge about him; something of a core of anger.
• In Red Riding Hood (the movie), the village werewolf – after his reveal – has sympathizable reasons for his actions. He has a complex family situation. His killings make sense to the viewer. And the young character who’s turned into a wolf at the end is actually very sensitive and kind. (S)he makes for a more interesting wolf than the stereotype.
• And, lastly, Jacob Black is anything but angry. Compared to the the other characters, he has a boy-like nature. He’s open, forgiving and thoughtful. He wants to do right by everyone else. Sure, he has his moments of anger, but his character is anything but what we’d expect in a werewolf.

That’s lesson #2 – don’t write your werewolf character as simply an angry, overly masculine man. If anything, try to stay away from that stereotype as much as possible. It’ll make for a much more interesting character!

Conclusion

When I set out to study the werewolf character, I wasn’t sure what I would find. In fact, my expectations weren’t terribly high. However, I came away with some wonderful insights into what makes the werewolf character work and what doesn’t. Hopefully that’ll also encourage you and other writers to build more werewolf characters in the future!

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Oh haunted houses, how we love you! There’s something about the old, often decaying estate that speaks to the Gothic soul. In many ways it’s the literary equivalent of an old cemetery. Perhaps it’s the history, the ghosts that haunt that place with their own stories, or just the quiet solitude that accompanies the forgotten things of this world. Regardless, there’s a certain question that these types of places raise that appeals to the deeply intuitive mind.

It’s not surprising that this is an often used Gothic trope, so often that most Gothic novels – even contemporary ones – use some form of an old house or castle. But what does it symbolize? Is it just there to make the book feel Gothic, because we like haunted houses? Or does it have a larger purpose to play?

The answer is yes, crumbling estates, or haunted houses do have a much greater meaning. In this post I’d like to look at what that is and how to both recognize it in the books we love and incorporate it into our own writing. But since haunted houses are so ubiquitous, I thought that it would be easiest if we look at them in groups based on how they’re used in literature.

Beware: some plot spoilers ahead.

The Past

Probably the most obvious and readily accessible answer to the old haunted house is that it represents the past in some way. The house is old, it’s seen the history and drama of all the people that passed through it. It’s easy to see the connection between that literal fact and the symbolism of the past.

The House of Whispers by Jane Purcell, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and The Turn of the Screw by Henry James have all used an old house in this way.

In The House of Whispers, the protagonist Hester Why is running from her past and instead finds herself in a home where the past holds the present in its grip. It’s not surprising then that Purcell wrote the book as a parallel story between Hester’s encounter with Morvoren House in the present and the history of house’s owner, Louise Pinecroft, in the past. Hester is a surprising character in that she’s very unlikable in many ways. She’s an alcoholic who demands that others need her or else. But at Morvoren House she comes face-to-face with a spell that hangs over the house, a spell that will require the most selfless act if she is to be reconciled to her own past.

In The Shadow of the Wind, the old Aldaya home lies abandoned. But the history of the author Julián Carax is intertwined with the history of this home and the Aldaya family. As the protagonist, young Daniel, unravels the story of what happened there, it is only his discovery of his love for Bea Aguilar in that very house that grounds his discovery of Julián’s lost love for Penélope Aldaya. The house, though crumbling, gives solidarity to the things that would otherwise be lost or intangible like the shadow of the wind.

In The Turn of the Screw, the country house, Bly, holds the ghosts of all of the ways that the prior governess and gardener have tainted the innocence of the two children, Flora and Miles. The gardener, Peter Quint, lurks both inside and outside the house and from the parapet. The former governess, Miss Jessel haunts the grounds of the estate. For the children, there’s no escape from their presence – both literally and figuratively – and the extent to which that past still haunts them.

Notice that in these types of uses, the houses aren’t necessarily destroyed in the end because, of course, the past can’t be destroyed.

Lies & Family Secrets

It’s also not much of a stretch to see why old houses are often used to represent family secrets. What is a house if not for the family that inhabits it? Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and The Gates of Evangeline by Hester Young both use old houses to represent the family lies and secrets that reside therein.

In Jane Eyre, Rochester’s house, Thornfield Hall, is just that: a thorn in their present and future. Why? Because it holds a secret part of Rochester’s past that he can’t escape. He tries to hide it from everyone, including Jane, but those types of secrets can never be contained. It’s only after his secret is discovered that he is soon free from it. But at a terrible cost.

In The Gates of Evangeline, the house, Evangeline, plays a role that bridges both the prior category – the weight of the past – and this one. The novel is an admirable contemporary take on classic southern Gothic literature. In southern Gothic writing, an old home – often a plantation – is generally used to represent the idyllic presentation of The South that hides or masks its dark past – often, but not exclusively, a reference to slavery. There’s some of that in this book in the secret homosexual life of one of the family members. But there’s also a much greater family secret (and lie) that is the central point of the book. The house, with its gates, appears to bar itself from those who would take from the family, when in reality, the truth is just the opposite.

The Character(s)’ Mental State

In other novels, the old or haunted house represents the [negative] mental state or flawed perspective of one or more characters, often the protagonist. This is the case in The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson, The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters and Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier.

In The Haunting of Hill House, the titular home is studied by a paranormal researcher and two young women with their own unearthly experiences who are on the hunt for evidence of the supernatural. As they progress, the house begins to take over the mind of one of the young women, Eleanor. It becomes clear that the house is nothing but a proxy for her mental instability. She’s seeking a home where she can belong, a home that will give her refuge from her own precarious state. But of course, such a thing doesn’t exist.

In The Little Stranger, the house, Hundreds Hall, actually reflects the antagonist, Dr. Faraday. The little stranger – a ghost-like manifestation that imbues the house with incidents of the uncanny – is his own. As is his greed for wealth and status, the hundreds that possession of such a house would give him. His greed progressively ratchets up, empowering the house with a form of magic that acts out in uncanny events that eventually reach a level of violence that can only be escaped, not resolved.

In Rebecca, the new Mrs. de Winter deals with the weight of the past hanging over her husband’s estate, Manderley. She is faced with a dark family secret that demands resolution. But more than either of these, she must confront her own flawed perspective, birthed in her crippling sense of inferiority. Manderley with its secrets in every corner, haunts her not because the past should control her to that extent, but because she has created a false version of that past.

Notice that unlike other uses of old estates, when the house represents a character’s detrimental mental state, resolution is usually only found by destroying the house or forsaking it (if the character overcomes the negative mental state) or by killing the character (if the mental illness cannot be healed). There’s no other way out.

A Destructive Belief System

The last symbolic use of old houses relates to a belief system – often pervasive – that threatens either the characters themselves or those around them. This was how Stephen King used the old house in Salem’s Lot and how Silvia Moreno-Garcia used the house in Mexican Gothic.

In Salem’s Lot, the protagonist, Ben Mears, sets out to uncover the truth behind the sinister rumors surrounding Marsten House in his hometown of Jerusalem. When a strange newcomer moves into the town and takes up residence in the house, only appearing at night, his arrival coincides with several disappearances. Ben soon discovers that unlike himself, most of the townspeople reject the notion of any real evil and thus are more vulnerable to it.

In Mexican Gothic, Noemí Taboada goes to High Place, the aptly named house of her cousin’s in-laws, to verify her cousin’s claim that she is being held prisoner. As she uncovers the truth, Noemí discovers that the family members – fervent eugenicists – hold a destructive belief about their own superiority and the inferiority of all other people. So much so that they intend to go to drastic measures to perfect those around them. The house also embodies this and acts out against those who are outside of the family. It is – both symbolically and fantastically – the heart of this belief system.

Conclusion

Though these seem quite different from one another, each of these could be said to represent either something that lies beneath the characters (as the foundation of a house does) or is a structure within which they are forced to operate (as a house itself would be). This is why the tangible use of a house fits such a use so well.

If you are crafting your own novel, Gothic or otherwise, and wish to use an old house in highly symbolic ways, consider that. There may be many other options for the house’s underlying meaning. However, it should act in one of these two ways.

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