Gothic Is a State of Mind
When we think of Gothic literature, it’s easy to conjure the expected images—cobwebbed mansions, howling winds, flickering candlelight. But to me, Gothic isn’t defined by setting. It’s a state of mind.
It’s the instinct that tells you beauty won’t last. It’s the awareness that the past never really lets go. It’s not just a genre, but a worldview shaped by longing, dread, obsession, and awe. The Gothic mind sees life through a storm-darkened lens—fragile, haunted, never quite whole.
Gothic fiction is feverish by nature. It doesn’t deal in detachment or irony, but in raw emotion—grief, terror, desire. A Gothic character doesn’t shrug at fate; they’re consumed by it. Love turns to madness. Guilt festers. Long-buried secrets claw their way to the surface.
This is why these stories endure. Instead of smoothing over pain, they illuminate it—beauty and horror tangled together like ivy through broken stone. Sublime.
Some modern authors write with this same intensity:
Toni Morrison, especially in Beloved, channels the Gothic through haunting and historical trauma. Her characters are quite literally haunted, not just by ghosts, but by memory.
Cormac McCarthy offers a stripped-down Gothic: apocalyptic, violent, and indifferent to human survival. Blood Meridian and The Road are sun-scorched, but deeply Gothic in their fatalism and biblical weight.
Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace pulses with dread and doubt. Even The Handmaid’s Tale, often read as dystopian, carries Gothic shadows—entrapment, silence, hidden horrors.
Shirley Jackson is pure Gothic unease. The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle drip with dread, isolation, and unreliable perception.
Kazuo Ishiguro writes of memory and regret—two key Gothic obsessions. In Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day, the past doesn’t just haunt—it defines.
Donna Tartt’s The Secret History might wear the clothes of a literary thriller, but its bones are Gothic: obsession, transgression, and guilt that festers. Even The Goldfinch is steeped in exile, beauty, and emotional ruin.
Joyce Carol Oates embraces full-on Gothic intensity in books like Bellefleur and The Accursed. Her characters spiral inward, unraveling beneath the weight of violence and identity.
Gillian Flynn taps into Gothic’s psychological undercurrent—twisted families, buried truths, women shaped by trauma. Sharp Objects is Southern Gothic at its most intimate and brutal.
I wrote Mademoiselle Frankenstein from that place—fevered, storm-lit, haunted. Océane’s world is drenched in yearning and grief, bound to the past and bleeding into the future. The horror is not just in the events, but in what they reveal: about love, loss, and what it means to create something you can’t control.
To live with a Gothic state of mind is to recognize the fragile scaffolding of the world. Every triumph carries a shadow. Every face hides a story. Every house remembers.
Have you ever felt a moment where beauty and fear collided, or grief stirred something sublime?
