Gothic YA – A Starter Reading List – The Book Smugglers

New from Blackwell’s! Are you pining for more Young Adult books? Do you adore Gothic novels? You can now have both for the price of one!

Seriously now – being the Gothic lovers that we are, we’re immensely happy to contribute to the upcoming Gothic Evening at Blackwell’s.

The traditional idea of the Gothic novel conjures up images of foreboding manors, ghostly encounters, desolate landscapes, with a dash of dark romance. But Gothic lit - that is, fiction that blends elements of horror and romanticism (the artistic movement that glorified in strong emotion) - need not be so traditional. Today, YA authors are excelling at reinterpreting some of the elements of Gothic literature for new audiences. 

Here's a list of some recent Gothic YA novels that we’ve recently read, loved and highly recommend:

1. Dreaming of Amelia (or The Ghosts of Ashbury High) by Jaclyn Moriarty

A bunch of students at an Australian school are given an assignment for their English class – and the topic is Gothic Fiction. Their task is to write a personal memoir incorporating classic Gothic elements and the result is a brilliant epistolary novel about very contemporary issues that reads just like a traditional Gothic novel (or at least like what these student think a traditional Gothic novel should be). This book is terminally clever. You know, Gothically speaking.

2. Shadowed Summer by Saundra Mitchell 

Iris is a 14 year old whose summer holiday in a small town in Louisiana turns spooky as she is haunted by the ghost of a boy who disappeared years ago. This is a prime example of a Southern Gothic novel and it is one that fully explores the subgenre’s main characteristics: it relies on the supernatural side of the story to move the plot along while simultaneously providing relevant, contemporary social commentary.

3. The Monstrumologist series by Rick Yancey

This series follows the exploits of Dr. Pellinore Warthrope and his ward-cum-apprentice Will Henry as they confront the very real existence of monsters and the darkness within. The Monstrumologist books are a more traditional example of masterfully written and truly terrifying Gothic fiction, in the vein of Shelley and Stoker.

4. Texas Gothic by Rosemary Clement Moore

We both like to think of Texas Gothic as a modern Scooby Doo type of Gothic YA mystery. Starring a family of witches against a southwestern backdrop, Texas Gothic is pure FUN. 

5. The Dead of Winter by Chris Priestley 

We needed to include at least one Victorian haunted manor story on here, right? And The Dead of Winter by Chris Priestly is a perfect example, featuring the spectral ghost of a murder most foul and the one young man who can set things right.

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Ana Grilo and Thea James are two completely obsessed, sad, sick addicts when it comes to books. Faced with threats and cynicism from our significant others and because of the massive amounts of time and money we spend on books, we resorted to getting them delivered to our offices and then smuggling them into our homes (in huge handbags) to avoid detection. 

With The Book Smugglers we found a perfect outlet for our obsession! Reviews, recommendations, and other ponderings are our specialty. You can also follow us on Twitter.

A Sense of Place – Simon Bestwick

One of the key things about Gothic literature: the setting is a character.  That isn’t exclusive to Gothic literature, of course.  You could say that setting’s always a character- we’re all, to a lesser or greater extent, products of our environment.

But in Gothic literature, the setting is an active force- a castle, traditionally, dominating the landscape both visually and psychologically.  From The Castle of Otranto to Shirley Jackson’s Hill House (and beyond,) it’s a nightmare place; inside its walls, the rules are very different from outside.  Ghosts may walk and terrible things may prowl the shadows, but often the worst danger is from the living, as the house works on individual flaws and weak spots to cause or threaten insanity, violence and self-destruction.

These days, you’ll be hard put to find a castle that isn’t run as a tourist attraction.  But the haunted castles are still there; it’s just a case of knowing where to look for them.

Some, like Thomas Ligotti and the late Brian McNaughton, blend horror with fantasy to invent new worlds.  Others follow in the footsteps of Algernon Blackwood or Arthur Machen, and find those dark other worlds hidden in the substance of the everyday.

Brad Anderson’s film Session 9 is set in the Danvers Hospital, Massachusetts, a real-life abandoned lunatic asylum. Generations of patients- for genuine mental illness, or for their sexuality, unwed motherhood, pre-marital intercourse, or just being different- lived and died in such places across the Western world.  Many were buried in the hospital grounds; others survived only to be released, ageing and confused, into a world they couldn’t recognise.  Treatments and attitudes ranged from the compassionate to the appalling; tales of abuse, exploitation and dehumanisation abound.

Wasted lives, burned out, their grief on the walls like soot.   Urban explorers have captured the now-disused asylums’ empty corridors and silent rooms in all their bleak glory.  Viewing such images, it’s hard not to think that if there were ghosts, they’d be here.  And they might not welcome visitors.  Or worse, they might.

If you’re looking for present-day Britain’s haunted castles, here they are.

Or were.  Most of the asylums are now demolished. Severalls, Cane Hill, West Park, High Royds, Hellingly… even Danvers has been converted into apartments.  Still, a few may remain, tucked away in quiet corners- out of sight, out of mind, as they were always meant to be.  They’ll serve for a time yet, while the smart writers, the trailblazers look further afield- to abandoned towerblocks and council estates, perhaps- in search of new places where the shadows can make their home.

In the meantime, let me invite you to visit Ash Fell, the First World War veterans’ hospital that plays a central role in The Faceless. Not exactly a lunatic asylum, although there’s some resemblance - some of its inmates were scarred in body, rather than mind.  But it’s a bad place alright, filled with years of unimaginable suffering.  You enter at your peril.

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Born in Wolverhampton, Simon Bestwick escaped to the wilds of Lancashire aged two, where he remains.  He is the author of two novels - Tide of Souls and the just-released The Faceless, the collections A Hazy Shade of Winter  (just re-released as an ebook) and Pictures of The Dark, and a chapbook, Angels of the Silences. When not writing, he tries in vain to have a life and catch up on his sleep. He blogs at http://simon-bestwick.blogspot.com/.

The Gothic Weather – Steve Rasnic Tem

I think an important aspect of the Gothic we rarely capture (and I include myself) is its transient nature. The Gothic is like the weather—we can feel it coming, the electricity in the air, and we can witness the way it begins to change the quality of the light of our once sunny day, the clouds edging with gray, the shadows racing, and then we’re in the midst of it, the cold and the damp creeping into our clothes and transforming our skin, and we're terrified by its darkness and ferocity. But then it passes, and we find ourselves in a more temperate, perhaps more optimistic environment, where we can better appreciate the differences, where we can understand that, as overwhelming as it was, it was but a piece of a much larger and more complex world.

Or perhaps the Gothic is the ruined, disturbed landscape we have to pass through on our way to our final destination, and we’re forced to spend one night within its borders. Choose your favorite metaphor.

My point is that with some perspective this condition can be seen as transitory. We don’t spend our entire lives there, and I believe the Gothic can be fully appreciated only in context, and in contrast to what comes before and after. Spend all your time there if you like, but I think if you do you may miss its true significance.

I believe that in the Gothic we have two threads of authorial perspective coming together: horror and the weird, both evolving out of our mortal condition and our realization that ultimately we must die. Our fear of this reality drives the horror of it, and the absurdity that we are mortal when we have such strong immortal aspirations drives our sense of the weird, that somehow the impossible can be true. The horror of life terrifies and makes us despair, while our sense of the weird makes us feel such strangeness that we’re just as likely to react with black humor or even delight as with terror to where this experience takes us.

In my new novel,  Deadfall Hotel, (out in May from Solaris Books) I’ve tried to create the ultimate haunted resort, a place where our nightmares go, where the dead pause to rest between worlds, a place where our fears can walk about freely and elaborate themselves into fanciful phantasmagoria. It is a locale where the impossible is bound to happen. And yet it is also a funhouse, a setting enabling us to see the humor of our situation from a relatively safe vantage point, and still be thrilled by what we witness.

But it is also a stage where real life occurs, where a single father must make decisions about the well-being of a daughter developing into womanhood, where grief must be addressed and healing attempted, where mistakes are inevitably made and lessons imperfectly learned. And for me, it became a vehicle in which I could explore the roots of fear and society’s fascination with all things horrific.

It is also pay-by-the-night lodging where, after our visit has completed, we can drive away, to experience it again in memory, and quietly contemplate our limited stay.

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Steve Rasnic Tem's 300 plus short stories have appeared in such publications as Asimov's, Black Static, Interzone, and Stephen Jones' Best New Horror. He is a past winner of the British Fantasy and World Fantasy awards. His new novel, Deadfall Hotel, will be published by Solaris Books in May of 2012. In this Edward Gorey-esque, Mervyn Peak-esque novel a widower takes the job of manager at a remote hotel where the guests are not quite like you and me, accompanied by his daughter and the ghost of his wife--"a literary exploration of the roots of horror in the collective unconscious." New Pulp Press will be bringing out a collection of his noir short stories, Ugly Behavior, in August of 2012.

Visit the Tem home on the web at www.m-s-tem.com

The Gothic in Teen Fiction – Esther Saxey

There's a Gothic boom in teen fiction. Black covers. One word titles - Shiver, Linger, Fallen, Silence - like the results of a morbid game of Boggle.

I love the genre – but can you write Gothic fiction today with a clean conscience? It's rooted in fears of the outsider who challenges our identity, and this fear is expressed in deeply dodgy ways: often, it's innocent women being threatened by sinister sexual foreigners. Dracula is a perfect example. (Vampires are also dangerously dual-gendered and queer, having a mouth that both sucks and pokes.) The foundational teen Gothic – Stephenie Meyer's Twilight – uses this age-old tradition, of the appealing menace of sex. It's thrilling! But wrong! The vampire hero struggles with his desires to kiss the heroine and/or rip her head off.

So how can you rethink teen Gothic, so that it doesn't demonise sex, or insult everyone south of Calais?

You could change one of the Gothic's traditions. For example, A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray ditches the swooning girl of the Gothics for a brilliant fierce heroine. But writers who change one negative tradition often end up leaning heavily on the others. Bray's novel, set in Victorian England, uses India as a sinister, snake-eating counterpoint continent. So the sexual politics of the Gothic get tidied up, but race-based desire and revulsion still prop up the plot - not an ideal solution.

Another strategy is adopting a villain of whom you actually disapprove. But the Gothic often makes its villains highly glamorous. Without that tug of fascination and identification, combined with repulsion, it wouldn't be half as dangerous, and it wouldn't be Gothic – it would be simple horror. So Dracula is powerful and magnetically attractive, before he gets the chop. 

Some Teen Noir gets round the problem by using only the props of the genre: vampires are everywhere, but they behave like mortal moody dudes or cool kids (see Alex Duval's Vampire Beach series, set in Malibu). Plots are often simple romances or detective stories.

There's another strategy I find more interesting: showing the horrors of normality. The excellent Pretties by Scott Westerfeld and Delirium by Lauren Oliver are both set in conformist societies. The heroines intend to take a pill, or have an operation, that will make them a full and happy citizen. But more and more flaws appear in the plan, and in the society. The heroine begins to think heretical thoughts, of avoiding the pill or the op. But it's their route to adulthood, and they've longed for it for years.

The novels thus explore the tango between attraction and repulsion without using supernatural trappings – they're less obviously Gothic, but they rely on an old Gothic dynamic.

This approach has its own tradition: David Lynch's Blue Velvet with a white picket fence and a severed ear. Jeanette Winterson's short story “Newton”, where a town with freakishly neat routines tries to recruit the protagonist. Or Stepford Wives, in which suburban housewives are so happy that something must be wrong.

Kid's fiction also deals with conformist societies, but in a less conflicted way; the child protagonists hate the rules, fight the system or escape it, and save their society (see The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau or The Wind Singer by William Nicholson). But teen fiction, by contrast, gives more attention to the seductions of conformity, and that's what makes it Gothic. 

I think it's a particularly appealing plot for adolescents. Teens don't want to feel completely alone, but they're also struggling to create themselves as individuals.

But the struggle to be oneself, and the temptation of becoming something else – something worse – doesn't vanish with age. I still find the Gothic thrilling. And recent Gothic fiction is a refreshingly long way away from beheading a contagious Transylvanian polygamist.

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Esther Saxey's interests include the supernatural and the queer and how one gets confused with the other. Likes novels by Goths, novels about Goths and novels in the Gothic tradition.

Notes on the Suburban Gothic – Louis Greenburg

I’ve long been interested in the manifestations of the suburban Gothic in contemporary fiction, art and architecture. At first glance, there seems to be little to connect a grand Gothic cathedral and strip mall or a box house in any Western city’s suburban sprawl, but aesthetically they are on the same continuum.

Nineteenth-century Gothic fiction and the Gothic revival architecture of the same period – follies, faux ruins and mazes – is a reaction against the scientistic certainty of Enlightenment rationality. By setting their Gothic works in crumbling ruins of medieval cathedrals and in ancient castles, Coleridge, the Shelleys, Byron, Poe, the Brontës, Le Fanu and ultimately Stoker celebrate the invincibility of death and he inescapability of history. The bloody shadows of the Crusades cannot be expunged from Europe by Enlightenment politeness; the Gothic celebrates the rejection of scientific rationality and its neat polarities. In the gory darkness of the middle ages, life and death co-existed, good and evil, sex, love and hatred mingled in a heady, human soup that the clever scientists tried to strain. Enlightenment rationalists tried – and failed – to taxonomise the conflicts and contradictions out of human society. The nineteenth century Gothic delighted in showing how death and entropy would always emerge victorious.

Now instead of the impenetrable wisdom of scientists, we rely on governments and corporations, fashion magazines, websites and advertising agencies to classify us, to affirm the effervescence of life and keep death at bay. But just like a hundred years ago, the cracks always show: the ape – everywhere we look – emerges from beneath the human skin, apocalypse seeps from every crack in the thin pavement.

In the 1950s it seemed like it might work. Cars and unprecedented industrial affluence allowed the creation of suburban paradises where right-minded families could live in health and bliss. But soon those suburbs and the nuclear families they harboured behind their discreet walls became the festering-place of abuse and sexual violence. Once they were hidden from the gaze of the broader community, families could practice their evil power imbalances in seclusion.

This is where the suburban Gothic of recent years emerges. Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls is a definitive portrait of abuse and neglected children wandering lost in the suburban wasteland, just as the flawed Gothic heroes – broken, irredeemable and wandering the wasteland, forever in exile – did a century and two before. And who comes to the rescue? To whom do the lost souls run? To vampires, of course (when modern vampires still had teeth) – that ultimate symbol of sex, death, life, pleasure, torment and irresponsibility – they care nothing for human rules. 

Our crumbling cathedrals – the suburban Gothic settings where life and death, love and hate, sex, pain and redemption stew together – are now malls, hospitals and schools; those grandiose edifices where the cant of systemised order and death-defiance is preached. Take a close look at your surgeon, your headmaster, your corporate marketer: they hold your life – and death – in their hands.

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Louis Greenberg is a freelance editor and writer in Johannesburg and half of the horror writer S.L. Grey (@slgreyhorror). Their debut collaboration, The Mall, was released in 2011 from Corvus. The Ward comes out in 2012.

Introducing The Gothic – Jared Shurin

For the next two weeks on Charing Cross Read a series of authors and bloggers will help explain the contemporary significance of the Gothic - all culminating in a darkly fantastic live event at Blackwell’s on 8 March. 

Given the genre’s ubiquity in books, art, film and comics, this seems like an easy task. This isn’t a niche sub-genre like Steampunk - the Gothic has a long shadow that touches every shelf in the bookshop. In fact, the main challenge with the Gothic is the reverse of our normal task. We know the Gothic is significant because it is everywhere, but we don’t know what it is. If we can see it in romance and fantasy, horror and young adult, where do those genres end, and the Gothic itself begin?

I would suggest that the Gothic is less a genre than a meta-genre: a wriggly overlay of themes that have been adapted by each generation to their contemporary situations. Gothic’s own origin stems more from market-savvy literary artifice than organic development, having sprung forth fully-formed from the head of Horace Walpole in 1764. For Walpole, the Gothic was an experiment in blending two forms of pre-existing literature: the chivalric romance and the modern novel. From the former, he nicked epic scale and intimate tragedy. From the latter, he pulled humour and the crowd-pleasing supernatural. Walpole wasn't aiming for the established aristocracy; he was targeting the aspirational middle class. This is even reflected in the title he selected: his work was dubbed "Gothic" in order to give it a sense of history, of cultural weight. 

It’s appropriate, then, that Gothic novels are frequently about the struggle for identity and for place (socially, geographically, emotionally) and the conflict between the old and the new (often represented in terms of class or generation). In the 19th and 20th century, Gothic novels began to discuss race as well, and overseas authors (predominantly in the American South) interpreted those larger themes in terms of their local context. Similarly, side by side with the Young Adult boom of recent years, authors have begun to use the Gothic to examine adolescence as well.

The Gothic is, in a sense, deliberately cheesy: transmogrifying what are ordinarily quiet discussions of class, gender and belonging into something with crumbling towers, angry ghosts and mad wives in attics. The mechanism, then, is to externalise and exaggerate its concerns in order to examine them at arm's length. Inner conflicts become outer ghosts; class issues become vampires, overbearing forebears become collapsing towers and puberty becomes a particularly nasty pack of werewolves.

Aesthetically, the tropes of the Gothic are almost immediately recognisable - cloaks and corsets, towers and vaults, eyeliner and wedding dresses. But the Gothic goes beyond these (slightly hackneyed) elements. In Jerrold E. Hogle's Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Hogle identifies three general parameters: "an antiquated or seemingly antiquated space", "hidden secrets from the past that haunt the characters" and elision (to a varying degree) between "the earthly laws of conventional reality and the possibilities of the supernatural".

All three are open to broad interpretation. As S.D. Crockett's After the Snow illustrates, for example, the past could be our present, and that our contemporary society can become antiquated history in a few short years. Christopher Fowler's Hell Train and Jon Courtenay Grimwood's The Fallen Blade are both crafted around dangerous secrets - protagonists struggling with their own repressed natures. Both novels depend on antiquated spaces and buried secrets. Fowler’s protagonists sprinting endlessly between the cars of a blasphemous train, confronting their own sins. Grimwood’s characters stalk the alleys and palaces of an alternate Venice, trying to overcome the nature demanded by both their bloodlines and their politics. 

Another modern approach to the Gothic is via supernatual incursion, as with novels by Tanith Lee and Suzanne McLeod. While Lee's body of short stories and novels is so extensive it is impossible to generalise, her work generally tends to include a subtle, deliberately poeticised touch of the supernatural. McLeod's Spellcrackers series also addresses supernatural elements in the real world, but does so more explicitly, with her books focused almost entirely on the integration of the impossible within a contemporary context.

Gothic elements have likewise found a modern expression in the visual arts. The Gothic has been adapted to modern artistic styles (for example, the art of Emma Vieceli or Darren Banks) yet have also stayed true to its original themes (for instance the supernatural glimpsed in the art of John Kaiine and the fading antiquity captured in the photography of Joel Meadows). The great boom of Gothic cinema was, of course, the golden age of Hammer Films in the 1960s and 70s, but the dramatic revival of the Hammer brand and today’s endless parade of vaguely historical and thoroughly supernatural television dramas are both evidence of a new dawn (or is that evening?) of the Gothic in media.

Walpole's experiment has proven to be an unstoppable and uncontrollable force. His literary invention, intended to be populist, has proven timeless as well. 

Over the next few weeks, guest bloggers and authors will go into more detail about what Gothic means to them, from Southern to suburban, teenagers to weather patterns. We hope you also have the opportunity to join us on the evening of 8 March, as we discuss even more interpretations of the Gothic in person at Blackwell's Charing Cross. The evening's guests include many of the authors and artists mentioned above, plus other great figures in horror, fantasy and romance.

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Jared Shurin is a director of The Kitschies, the prize for progressive, intelligent and entertaining genre fiction, presented by The Kraken Rum. More about the award can be learned at www.thekitschies.com. 

Something for the weekend.

The Somnambulist by Essie Fox

While I’m not normally a fan of writing set in the Victorian era, this is an exceptional book. A well written gothic tale of young Phoebe who lives under the heavy strain of her sanctimonious and puritanical mother, Maud and her vivacious, glamourous aunt Cissy. Phoebe suffers one of the biggest tragedies of her young life only to find out that she has been lied to about where she comes from, who she is and most things about her life so far. The characters are excellently moulded, particularly Cissy and one gets a vivid impression that the character is based on someone the author may know/have known. Set in Victorian London’s East End in real locations such as Tredegar Square near Mile End Station and up the road in Bow, there are very believable situations constructed in the book dealing with racism and in particular, anti-semitism as well as sexism. Fox has crafted a tale unlike any other I’ve read here and having just finished it I want to read it all over again! A dream to read, this is an absolute page-turner and I recommend you read it if you’re a fan of the Victorian era, or just generally good writing.

Michelle

Buy it here