Ok, I took a Gothic Literature course back when I was an English Major and it was an amazing course! Dr. Grogan at Bishop's is amazing! She used to have this innocent smile on her face as she described in her English accent: 'guts floying everwhaire'. But the Gothic novel is a bit different than horror, or then thriller, it's very calm. The Gothic comes and gets you by being really on-your-tip-toes kind of creepy. First off! Let's talk themes:
Incest: A big theme in the Gothic, very disturbing, very hidden. Certain novellas like The Castle of Otranto have incest themes to describe the falling into oblivion of a whole bloodline (since it is tainted). This trope is very fun to use if you want to kill off numerous characters. Incest also leads to insanity for some, and deformity, has the incest been consummated. A Sicilian Romance has a strong incestuous presence in the main character and her brother, but it doesn't become anything.
Supernatural patentas: Ghosts, Vampires, Ghouls, even Zombies are very freaky, but they have to either be very 'undertone' as I call it, or out in the open, like a Vampire Lord, like Dracula for example. He is refined in his choice of blood of the vein. Ghosts can come in to freak out the main character and then maybe point them in the right direction.
Flailing Heroines and Cowardly Heros: So in the Gothic novel, you have both the young virgin woman who is running around flailing her arms terrified of everything (obv. I'm exagerating here) but really, whether she is stuck in a castle or running around escaping her father who wants to marry her to some old guy, (A Sicilian Romance) she's going to suck as it and run into every possible danger there is out there. Only! She will never get hurt, or not a lot. She is the heroine, and she can't die, unless you want to kill her (near the end, though). Cowardly Heroes. Sometimes the heroine will have a brother who kind of sucks at saving her, and who is scared of the world. He has to be good sometimes, but usually he falls into the same traps, only gets out of them more easily (sometimes, sometimes not).
Love: Ohhh c'est amour! Love is sometimes complicated, but not in a Gothic horror. The Heroine will end up with the man she loves (or alone, dying of insanity or something) and the guy will have like a lot of trauma about his life, but he'll be healed by her caress. Gothic books have CHEESY-ASS endings and shit to make everything feel sorta better, unless you don't use the 'love' theme, and so then you can have a creepy ending.
Religion: Yes, use it. Religion is scary, freaky, under wraps, full of sex, violent, self-fladgelation, torture and words of the Lord that say: go cause some genocides. The book: The Monk, by Monk Lewis is about a monk who is sexually deviant because of this temptress who dresses as a boy monk in the first place. That Monk ends up killing his mother and raping his sister, and it's very Gothic. Use the confession stand, the altars, the high belfrys, the Hunchback of Notre--oops, wrong book. However, that's very Gothic! Because Quaz is like super deformed and stuff. Hmm... never saw V.H.'s NDDP as Gothic. Nice!
So with that, I hope you'll find your inspiration to write a gothic novel. I know I did. :) I read the synopsis of the Monk au complet and then I wrote TAFOW :) Good luck!!
Character of the Day:
Alycie Hammond
Appearances: --
Bio: Alycie is Dominitian Hammond's first wife. She is made a Vampire by him and rules next to him as Vicereine. This is circa 3500. She is beautiful, with blonde hair and copper highlights, blue eyes and small freckles. Dominitian said he found her beautiful because she looked like him, *facepalm* and because she reminds him of the first love he ever had that he had to let go. ;) She calms him, and after her arrival into the political world, Dominitian becomes a lot less power-hungry and callous, and the Urban Quarter gets a better reputation. However, Dominitian will always remain a bad-ass with attitude, and that's the way they want him to stay.
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