The Art of Gothic Retellings
There’s something about the resurrection of Gothic stories. The genre lives in tension between memory and invention—it doesn’t just tolerate reinvention; it demands it. When I wrote Mademoiselle Frankenstein, I didn’t simply revisit Mary Shelley’s classic. I followed its ghost down a dark, different hallway.
I wondered: What if the creator wasn’t Victor, but a woman? What if the story unfolded during a war—America’s Revolution—rather than a Romantic-era parlor in Geneva? What if the act of creation wasn’t rooted in ambition, but in grief? These questions didn’t just shift the plot; they transformed the emotional core of the novel.
Retelling a Gothic story isn’t a matter of swapping out settings or flipping gender roles. It’s about preserving the genre’s obsessions—death, inheritance, the inescapability of the past—while refracting them through a new prism. The best retellings don’t imitate the original; they interrogate it. They confront its questions with fresh urgency.
Consider Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s haunting prequel to Jane Eyre, which gives voice to the silenced “madwoman in the attic.” Or Valerie Martin’s Mary Reilly, which lets us glimpse Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde through the weary eyes of a housemaid. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber offers decadent and brutal reimaginings of old fairy tales, where the heroines don’t always wait to be rescued.
Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, though not a direct retelling, channels the Gothic tradition of eerie disappearances and the weight of an inescapable past, much like The Turn of the Screw. Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom is a subversive response to H.P. Lovecraft’s The Horror at Red Hook, reframing the story from the perspective of a Black protagonist, exposing the racism underlying Lovecraft’s original tale while still embracing cosmic horror. Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca is a Gothic reworking of Jane Eyre, where the second wife of Maxim de Winter is haunted—literally and psychologically—by the presence of the first, the enigmatic and doomed Rebecca.
Gothic retellings aren’t only about character shifts. They’re about pressure points—how a different narrator, a new time period, or an altered motivation can yield something eerily familiar and utterly original. They keep the genre alive by ensuring it continues to evolve.
I believe Gothic fiction remains so durable because its themes are never out of season: the ache of loss, the lure of forbidden knowledge, the unease of being haunted by others or by oneself. A great retelling doesn't lay these to rest. It listens for their return.
What’s your favorite Gothic retelling—and what new retelling would you love to see?
