“I pass, like night, from land to land…” I mentioned the cursed wanderer in my recent post on Nautical Gothic, so I wanted to examine the concept here in a bit more detail. This is a character archetype that finds its way into many Gothic works both new and classic, either in the form of a villain, a tragic side character, or an antihero. The cursed wanderer is an outcast from society, usually immortal or otherwise supernatural, and never establishes roots but rather is compelled to wander from place to place as the consequence for some past sin. Continue reading Gothic Tropes: The Cursed Wanderer
Tag: Dracula
Nautical Gothic
What could be more frightening than the crumbling spires of an ancient castle or the echoing halls of a cursed family’s ancestral home? How about the alien landscape of the open sea! With its unknowable depths and mercurial moods, the ocean is rife with mystery and danger. And out in the middle of the ocean, one can experience an isolation far more profound than even the most remote cliffside abbey. In many ways, the ocean is the perfect Gothic landscape. On any given voyage, a sailor might have to battle against the weather and natural environment, against monsters, against the restless dead, against the depravity and superstitious nature of his fellow man, or even against the phantasms of his own mind. Here are just a few examples of Gothic works that take place, in whole or in part, at sea:
Re: Dracula Podcast Review
Happy birthday to me! I just turned thirty last week and I can’t think of a better present than the fact that my birthday month is the start of Dracula season. Bram Stoker’s classic vampire novel begins with an entry from Jonathan Harker’s journal dated May 3. Last year, I wrote about following along with the email newsletter Dracula Daily, which kicked off a fervor for experiencing the story of Dracula in real time through the letters and diary entries that comprise this epistolary tale being sent to you one by one on the corresponding date. If you missed it last time, the Dracula Daily newsletter has just started up again for its third yearly cycle. But this year, there’s yet another way to follow along with the daily adventures of Jonathan Harker and his friends, and this one’s in my favorite format: audio. Re: Dracula is a brand new podcast that turns the letters and diary entries of Stoker’s novel into short audio episodes. As with Dracula Daily, each episode is released on the date that corresponds with the events of the novel.
Flowers in Gothic Literature
Spring is finally here in the northeastern U.S.! Magnificent magnolia trees and sunny daffodils have been bringing a smile to my face as I go on my lunchtime walks. But beautiful things can have a dark side, and if the film Midsommar has taught us anything, it’s that you can still experience intense terror while surrounded by colorful flowers. Flowers pop up in all sorts of unexpected places in Gothic literature. Here are just a few examples below:
Dracula Daily: An Internet-wide Book Club
You have no idea how warm and fuzzy it makes me feel to see vast swathes of the internet get passionate about Gothic literature! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, let me introduce you to the best thing that has happened online this year: Dracula Daily. Created by web designer Matt Kirkland, Dracula Daily is a brilliant new way to experience Bram Stoker’s vampire classic. The project takes advantage of Dracula’s epistolary format to turn the text of the novel into an email newsletter so that you can experience the story in real time. If you’re unfamiliar: Dracula is told entirely through a series of journal entries, letters, newspaper clippings, and ship’s logs dated from May 3 to November 7. Subscribers to Dracula Daily will get each entry delivered to their inboxes on the corresponding date. Though we’re already a few weeks into the story, it’s not too late to sign up! You can go back and read the entries you missed in the Dracula Daily archive. I started last week and just got caught up. Continue reading Dracula Daily: An Internet-wide Book Club
Gothic Settings: Asylums
Complete isolation within your padded cell walls. The screams and unintelligible ramblings of your fellow inmates. The torturous “treatments” that are more terrifying than the monsters in your own mind. What could make a better setting for horror than the madhouse? As popular as lunatic asylums still are in modern horror, this setting has its roots deep in Gothic literature—going back further than you might think. Indeed, like so many of the other recurring Gothic settings, these institutions lend themselves particularly well to Gothic tropes. Isolation and imprisonment are at the core of the asylum’s function. Any story set within its walls can use the spectacle of insanity as the engine of horror. And apart from madness itself, there are also the horrors of the cruel treatment, cramped spaces, and poor physical conditions that unfortunately characterize such institutions.
Review of Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula
The story in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1987) has been told and retold many times, with innumerable adaptations and reimaginings. But what is perhaps the earliest of these only came to light recently: The 1901 Icelandic “translation” of Dracula is no translation at all, but a completely different story! It shares the basic premise and indeed many scenes with the monumental classic of the vampire genre, but Makt Myrkranna—as the Icelandic translation was called, which translates to “Powers of Darkness”—features brand new characters, unfamiliar scenes, and even an entirely different motivation and modus operandi for the infamous Count.
But is Makt Myrkranna an enterprising translator’s attempt to exert his own creative license over Stoker’s story, or is it merely based on an earlier draft of Dracula than the one that eventually made it to print? Literary scholar Hans Corneel de Roos puzzled over this question when he first discovered the unique nature of the Icelandic text in 2014. And now you can explore this question for yourself with the first ever English translation of the Icelandic version of Dracula, complete with scholarly annotations and other supplementary materials. Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula, translated from the Icelandic and annotated by de Roos, came out in 2017. The publishers were actually kind enough to send me a copy back when it first came out, but—relatively new to blogging at the time and intimidated by the intensive scholarly approach and the sheer size of the hardcover—I put it on the back burner and never quite got around to reading it. (Apologies!) But now, as part of my resolution to read more of the books festering away on my shelves, I finally picked it up again—and I wish I hadn’t waited! Powers of Darkness is a truly interesting story both in its own right and in regard to its tangled history with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and I would recommend it to hardcore Dracula scholars and casual Gothic literature enthusiasts alike. Continue reading Review of Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula
Gothic Settings: Castles
I’m starting a new blog post series! Much like my Gothic Tropes series, these posts will highlight recurring elements that appear time and again throughout different works of Gothic literature. But rather than focusing on plot elements, motifs, or themes, the Gothic Settings series will examine the physical locations in which these stories are set. Of course, I had to start off this week with the most obvious classic setting for a Gothic novel: the castle.
Review of John Eyre—Monsters in the Attic
How many times can one Gothic novel be retold? If that novel is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—a story that spawned other great classics like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and served as a blueprint for the entire genre of mid-century Gothic romance pulps—I think its generative capabilities are endless. One of the latest authors to put her own spin on Jane Eyre is Mimi Matthews, with John Eyre: A Tale of Darkness and Shadow, coming out tomorrow, July 20. From the title, you might guess that this is a gender-swapped retelling, but it’s actually much more than that: John Eyre uses the familiar beats of Brontë’s classic (along with elements from a few other Gothic novels) to tell an entirely different story. I am thrilled to have been invited to participate in the official blog tour for this book’s release, because I need more friends to geek out about this charming and clever reimagining with! Continue reading Review of John Eyre—Monsters in the Attic
Gothic Tropes: Found Document Framing Device
Usually, when discussing tropes in Gothic literature, I talk about certain recurring themes and plot elements (such as madness, prophecies, or burning houses) or character types (like the Creepy Housekeeper, Corrupted Clergy, or First Wife). But the genre also makes use of particular structural or stylistic techniques. One of my favorite stylistic tropes in Gothic literature is the found document framing device.
Continue reading Gothic Tropes: Found Document Framing Device