Thoughts of a Gothic nature - Michelle Lovric

 One of my poems has just been awarded a ‘Highly Commended’ in the Bridport Prize.

Judge Lemn Sissay, kindly wrote of my ‘Niece comes out of the attic’: ‘I was gripped by the gothic in this poem. And by what was not said. It’s beautiful. Powerful. Evocative.’

 Lovely to read, of course, but the word that excited me the most was ‘gothic’. My brain is, at the moment, in a fever of gothic for a new, experimental piece of work, in which I am trying to reconcile a sense of the gothic with some incidents of apparent modernity.

Gothic (henceforth I’ll give the word its deserved capital letter): I come to the conclusion that never, or hardly ever, has one word suffered its meaning to be stretched so far and into so many dimensions.

Here, with apologies, is an uncomfortably rushed and creaky whistle-stop tour of the Gothic, simply to signal its pervasiveness. (I am not going to illustrate it, so as not to impede its speed. I see the reader hurtling alone and by night, in a coach drawn by black horses across vast and empty terrains where wolves howl.)

We started with Goths – Visi and Ostro – ‘barbarian’ tribes of the north, whose rise is associated with the fall of the Roman Empire, including the sacking Rome in 410AD. This first Goth manifestation gave us a language, and alphabet and a script, also known as ‘blackletter’.

Then came ‘Gothic’ art and architecture, generally thought to have seen the light first in 12th century France but spreading in all directions. The architecture was despised by the early art-historian Giorgio Vasari, who saw infidel barbarity in its sinuous lines, pointed arches and ribbed vaults (the same elements, perversely, were adored by John Ruskin, a promulgator of Neo-Gothic in the 19th century. Apart from the 'virtue' inherent in each craftsman's creative contribution, Ruskin favoured what he saw as properly pious love of Creation’s flowing, soaring, irregular shapes over Renaissance man’s sterile geometry.)

Before Ruskin & co came to revive the Gothic in our built environment, the term had lurched into a new form. Literature appropriated ‘Gothic’ to describe the kind of fiction that creates a frisson of ‘sublime’ terror in the reader. Screeching away from the restrained formality of the classical, this literature feasts on heightened emotions, death, unnatural life-forces, secrecy, ghosts, the interplay of irresistible attraction and terrified repulsion. Other tropes: ancient curses, brooding anti-heroes, forbidden loves, the torture, slaughter or corruption (moral murder) of innocent victims, often young. Sometimes the horrifying mystery is resolved as ‘explained supernatural’. Other times, the horror is generated by the darkest sides of human nature. If a journey is taken, it is (forgive me) alone and by night, in a coach drawn by black horses across vast and empty terrains where wolves howl.

Horace Walpole is thought to have started it in England with his novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), which was initially published as an authentic rediscovered mediaeval romance. Gothic writers fed on one another’s Gothic imaginings. William Beckford’s Vathek, also originally published as a ‘found’ manuscript, was a favourite of Lord Byron. Another early classic of the genre was Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, drafted during a ghost story competition in which Byron himself participated

A generalized Gothic architecture – rich in complicated shadow, beset with ancient dark towers, secret tunnels and dungeons – is often the backdrop. Providing the rib-vaulted settings for evil acts, Gothic architecture seems to exert the dark power Vasari saw in it: monstrous and barbarous, a kind of disorder. As at Hogwarts, both ancient and supernatural mischiefs stir in the very fabric of the castles, abbeys and monasteries where the characters are confined in feverish proximity with all that terrifies them. These buildings are sometimes in a ruined state, redolent of moral, physical or emotional collapse in its inhabitants. Nature relentlessly, even cruelly, takes back what man, in his arrogance, thought he had set in stone immortally. Buildings, like human bodies, can rot. This is the ‘Gothic picturesque’ – the sublime beauty to be found in something that can otherwise connote horror.

Victorian Gothic gave us Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Bram Stoker’s Dracula and countless other novels, often played out in three thick volumes. Meanwhile, Gothic Revival or Neo-Gothic architecture delivered monumental markers like St Pancras Station. Any commuter can still get his or her daily dose of Gothic there, even now.

 Gothic was not confined to English literature. German had its Schauerroman ('shudder novel') and French its roman noir, all accessorized with similar tropes and settings. Nor was it confined to hardcover. Magazines started embracing the Gothic in Victorian times and have continued to this day.

Then came Hollywood, happy to draw on the Gothic model refined in literature, starting with movies based on the famous texts and then going on to develop its own language and iconography, which often associates young sexuality with violent death. The ruined castle or abbey backdrop is optional.

I find it quite extraordinary how many writers of the 20th century have been labelled ‘Gothic’. There are of course the obvious, like H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, but also William Faulkner (‘Southern Gothic’), Joan Aiken (‘New Gothic’) and Margaret Atwood (‘Southern Ontario Gothic’).

Moving on to the late twentieth century and beyond, we have Gothic video games, Goth music (Black Sabbath and their ilk) and the Goth fashion subcultures, which drew its aesthetics both from Gothic novels and poetry, as well as horror movies. Black prevails, with white for gaunt contrast: black nail-polish on pale hands; hair dyed profoundly black framing white faces with lips and eyes picked out in black. Trimmings and silhouettes are borrowed from a least a hundred years before: corsetted waists and lace.

For a while now, the Gothic seems to have moved away from a specific obsession with corpses, decay, curses, judgements and settings that contributed much to a sense of loss, dread and terror. We have moved away from a codified horror with specific visual elements, from innocents sacrificed to darkness, paying the price of ancient curses and hatreds that have festered for centuries.

Or have we? Where we’ve been shows Goth associated with the emotional and decorative paths of complicated and wild darkness. Where are we now? Well, this is what I’m working on and it’s not ready to share. Instead, here’s my ‘Gothic’ poem to be getting on with. Its vintage is April 2017.


                                  Niece comes out of the attic

in my red velvet wedding dress, that old sore rash of silk
shamed into horripilation just like the hairs
that tiptoe up my nape at the sight of her,
thirteen, with no idea.

I thought that tongue of threads had long since gone to die.
But all this time it cooled its heat on the rack
of harmless jumble upstairs,
fever-red undimmed.

Watching zipper trace her bones, the cold clicks down my spine.
The past, that wolf, half-eats tall tousle of brown-eyed niece.
It grips her, neck to calf, in the thousand teeth
of its greed-red maw.

Yet niece is not its rightful prey. The past may brush those narrow ribs
but she must not taste its carnivore breath nor gag its rankling.
So when the graceful gangle comes dancing
out of the attic

I smile with velvet teeth at niece in my red wedding dress.
I chew the truth, gulp down what’s gone, praise
the prance and ripple of her kin kid-limbs
beneath the long-shed skin.


Michelle Lovric’s website

THE PIERCED HEART by Lynn Shepherd . A review by Adèle Geras

Lynn Shepherd has just sent me this piece she's written about THE PIERCED HEART....sorry it wasn't here in time for the first appearance of this post!

The Pierced Heart:

A sequel, a star, and a strange tale

by Lynn Shepherd

The Pierced Heart is my fourth novel, and the fourth to feature the Charles Maddoxes, my two 19^th-century private detectives. When I wrote my first book, Murder at Mansfield Park, way back in 2008, I had no idea of turning the idea of a ‘literary mystery’ into a series. It just seemed an enormously enjoyable ‘conceit’ to work with another great work of fiction, and give the reader the double pleasure of a satisfying murder, and the chance to revisit the world and words of the incomparable Jane Austen. But after Murder at Mansfield Park came out people started to say they’d love to see Maddox back, and in Dickens’ bicentenary year I sent his great-nephew, the younger Charles Maddox, to walk shoulder to shoulder with Dickens through Victorian London. Since then I have thrust sent him head-first into the emotional maelstrom which was the lives of the Shelleys in A Treacherous Likeness, and finally and most recently confronted him with his most fearsome foe of all, the Baron Von Reisenberg. Why so fearsome? Because this new book takes its inspiration from Bram Stoker’s Gothic classic, Dracula.

Vampires are, of course, the gift that keeps on giving – look at True Blood, or The Originals, or The Twilight Saga, or the latest Jonathan Rhys Meyers NBC series. The list goes ever one and on. And I’d like to think The Pierced Heart has its own contribution to make, not just by taking the Dracula story back to its literary roots, but by recasting the vampire theme in terms of the clash of science and superstition in the middle of the 19^th century.

And now we come to the rather strange tale of the novel’s fate in the UK.

I had a two-book deal in the UK for Tom-All-Alone’s and A Treacherous Likeness, and when that came to an end I felt my relationship with my publisher had run its natural course, and I wanted to move on. My agent loved The Pierced Heart, as did my US editor, so when it was sent out to UK publishers in the summer of 2013 I was in an optimistic frame of mind. As optimistic, in fact, as I had ever been since I took up this ego-bruising game. But even though two dozen or so houses looked at it, none of them said yes.

So what, you ask, is the problem? Is it a lack of coverage? No, I don’t think so, since Tom-All-Alone’s was a book of the year for both the Spectator and Sunday Express in 2012, the Daily Mail called A Treacherous Likeness “an absolute must”, and it was a historical novel of the year in the BBC History magazine list for 2013. Is it the quality of the writing? Again, I don’t think so – it’s had a wonderful quote on Twitter from Ian Rankin, no less, and a Kirkus star (“another tour de force from Shepherd”). There were some UK editors who just didn’t take to it, as there will always be, but other comments ranged from “this is very good stuff” to “read aloud on a long car journey and had the family hooked” to “a very enticing atmosphere of menace and mystery. All the elements one could possibly wish for in a novel of this scope.” 

All of which leads me to deduce, in a mixture of bewilderment and sad frustration, that the real problem here is that The Pierced Heart features the Maddoxes once more. I’ve made a huge effort to ensure the book can be read in its own right, with no knowledge of the preceding novels, but it’s the ‘sequel thing’ that seems to have been its downfall in the UK. But why? Why should that make the slightest difference to a publisher? Who cares what logo is on the spine, as long as it sells? 

In fact, you might even think (as I did, in my naïveté) that an established character would be an advantage, as much of the hard PR graft is already done. But apparently publishers don’t want to take on a series started elsewhere because they see themselves as ‘brands’. Now I may not know much about publishing, but I’ve worked in marketing and communications for over 15 years, and I know a brand when I see one. Brands are things people buy, so an author is a brand, if they’re successful enough, but the publisher is only ever the vehicle for that brand. And the proof of that contention is that no-one has ever bought a novel because they liked who published it. I don’t go onto Amazon or into WHSmith thinking ‘that last book from [insert publisher’s name] was really good, I think I’ll see what else they’ve done’ and I bet you don’t either. In fact, I doubt most people outside the industry could even tell you who publishes their favourite authors. Because surely the only thing that matters to readers – and has ever mattered - is the quality of the writing.

So what next for me? Perhaps a new direction next time - perhaps something that’s not historical. And maybe, just maybe, Charles Maddox could be back one day too, if I can find a UK publisher to take him on. After all, stranger things have happened…. 

UK readers can buy The Pierced Heart in sterling, from Amazon UK.

I've written about Lynn Shepherd's novels before on this blog and here is a link to my post about her book A Treacherous Likeness.

I am a big fan of her work, because what she does seems to be something especially designed to appeal both to fans of existing works of literature and also to lovers of a good thriller. She's created a detective called Charles Maddox (who will, I hope,  be played by Benedict Cumberbatch in any future screen adaptations) and Charles winds his way in and out of the world created by other works of literature. In Tom-all-alone's, he wound his way in and out of the events and characters of Bleak House. In A Treacherous Likeness, Shepherd wrote of  the comings and goings of the Shelley circle and especially the events surrounding the famous night when Frankenstein was conceived. 

It was obviously only a matter of time before she turned her attention to Dracula.  In The Pierced Heart, though, she goes one better. Not only is this a novel which addresses the matter of vampires, (very popular in the 19th century, as witness the illustration below)  it's also one that deals with many other interesting topics in a way which ups the entertainment value no end. 

Perhaps because vampires in various guises are now so popular, Shepherd adds something that's equally spooky and unsettling while being the antithesis of the supernatural: the scientific.  There's an author's note at the back of the book (which I urge you to read as I did at the very end so as not to spoil any of the fun you're going to have along the way, shivering and shaking...) in which she explains very thoroughly how scientific advances in the late 19th century fed into this story of  serial murder, bloodsucking, illusion, phantasmagoria and so forth.  

              (19th century vampire killing kit) 


The story starts with Charles, our hero, going to look at manuscripts on behalf of the Bodleian Library in a castle belonging to Baron Von Reisenberg. Even though we think we know precisely the kind of place we're going to see, and exactly what Von Reisenberg will be like,   Shepherd manages to make all she writes about seem both new and thrilling. Events, atmosphere, character are all conveyed so well that even the most jaded reader of Gothic will be excited. There are shocks, revelations, discoveries of a most gruesome sort and we are left reeling at the end of Part One.

Events then pass to the Journal of a young woman called Lucy.  The novel moves from her account of matters to what is happening to Charles.  His narrative takes place in London.  The Great Exhibition is on and is currently attracting thousands to look at the newest examples of scientific discovery. Meanwhile, the police are baffled by a  serial killer who rips the throat out of poor prostitutes....the stage is set for a non stop action packed eventful and thoroughly gory and sensational story of love, manipulation, sinister experiments, waxworks, graveyards, sea mists, darkness, illusion and of course, the folklore of vampires.

I do urge anyone who is interested in any aspect at all of magic, illusion,  mesmerism and of course the original Dracula, to read The Pierced Heart.  It's not published in this country (why on earth not, publishers? Beats me!) but you can get the US edition from Amazon. 

Silent as the Grave - Celia Rees

Last Sunday, my daughter and I went on a pilgrimage to Kensal Green Catholic Cemetery to lay lilies on the grave of Krystyna Skarbek (nom de guerre, Christine Granville) a Polish agent of extraordinary daring and courage who served in the SOE during the Second World War and who was awarded the George Medal, an O.B.E. and the Croix de Guerre. She was a Countess, beautiful, glamorous, everything a female spy ought to be. She was rumoured to have been a friend of Ian Fleming and the inspiration for various Bond girls, notably Tatiana Romanova and Vesper Lynd, although her own life story is far more interesting than anything to be found within the covers of a James Bond novel. She served this country with bravery and loyalty but after the war she was turned away, services no longer required. She came to a sad and untimely end in 1952, murdered by a jealous lover in the foyer of an Earls Court hotel.

This might seem an odd mother and daughter activity for Mothering Sunday, but we had both read her biography, The Spy who Loved by Clare Mulley and I'd discovered http://www.findagrave.com, a site where you can find anybody's grave, famous or obscure.

I've always been a one for reading graves and epitaphs, even when I was a child. I used to walk through the churchyard to school and would often dawdle, reading gravestones, wondering about the  lives of the people buried there. Graveyards and cemeteries have gained greater significance, however, since I became a writer. They are good sources for names, for one thing. If you are setting a book in a particular place in a particular period, the local cemetery will give you a ready made selection which will be both appropriate and accurate to period and location. Just mix them up a bit.

Graveyards, or just graves have been a source of inspiration. I first saw the graves at Llanfihangel Abercowin Old Parish Church & Norman Grave-Slabs in South West Wales many years ago. Legend has it that these are the final resting places of a group of pilgrims on their way to or from St David's and who unaccountably starved to death in this place.  A friend and I became intrigued by the legend, the isolated, ruined church and the grave slabs with their mysterious human figures. There was a mystery here and one that, we felt, was not entirely explained by the antiquarians and historians.

 We wrote a spooky, time shifting screenplay, incorporating other local myths and legends and moving between the Celtic past and the present day. Sadly, The White Dog of Traventy is still in a drawer somewhere (or actually in a small suitcase) . It taught me one thing, don't waste time writing a screenplay. 

Still, some graveyards have been more productive for me. In the 1990s I had an idea for a vampire novel (I want the date noted). I decided to set the story (which would become Blood Sinister) in and around Highgate Cemetery in London. Highgate has a fine vampire history. Bram Stoker located Lucy Westenra's Mausoleum here in his novel, Dracula and there have been regular reports of vampire activity, right up until in the 1970s. 

Perfect setting for a book about a vampire. Graveyards are hugely evocative and are wonderful places for creating atmosphere. When I'm writing anything, I visit the setting if I possibly can, have a wander about, notebook and camera in hand. I also collect things. With Blood Sinister, I visited the old, Victorian Western Cemetery in Highgate. Huge and genuinely spooky, a real city of the dead. Lots of famous people are buried here. You can only go round it as part of a guided tour, in case you got lost and were never seen again. Not so much snatched by vampires, more likely to fall into an old vault or crumbling underground crypt. 

I also went to the old cemetery in Coventry where I took this photograph of a mausoleum, which would be the final resting place (or not) of my vampire character. While I was there, I found a bit of the wrought ironwork that had broken off, so I picked it up and kept it. Blood Sinister was always a good book to talk about on school visits. I'd take my 'souvenir' with me as an added a bit of  authenticity.

Cemeteries and graveyards are full of stories: enigmas contained within the epitaphs, dates of birth and death, the ages of the deceased. Even the memorials themselves: the lettering, the type of stone, the weathering can tell you something of the people who lived and died in a particular place. 

Yet e'en these bones from insult to protect
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Elegy Written In A Country Church-Yard

Thomas Gray (1716-71)


Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Interview About a Vampire and other Gothic Topics - Celia Rees

I've been thinking about all things Gothic. I am taking part in a panel event at the Lancaster Festival on 17th October with Cliff McNish, Chris Priestley and Dr Catherine Spooner from Lancaster University. I hope I pass muster.  By the time you read this it will already be over. Being asked to do something like that concentrates the mind. One has to think of something intelligent to say about what drives one's fiction and that involves delving down to find the roots of it.

I have visited the Gothic many times in my writing and it is through the Gothic that I began to write Historical Fiction. I can trace my fascination back to adolescence. When I was a teenager, I used to 'borrow' my brother's books. Most (if not all) would have been considered unsuitable reading, so I would 'borrow' in secret. When I think about it, nearly all my interests, from hard boiled American Crime Fiction to Ian Fleming, stem from these books. One of the books I purloined from under his bed was The Pan Book of Horror Stories.

I scared myself witless, but I was hooked.  The cover makes the book look lurid and trashy, but that's one of the things about Gothic, Dark Fantasy, or Speculative Fiction (posh words for Horror); quite often reputable, serious writers want to write in the genre and their stories are anything but trash. Inside the covers of this and the others in the series are stories by L. P. Hartley, C. S. Forester, Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen, M.R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu and Edgar Allan Poe. From there, I progressed to the works of Dennis Wheatley. Mr Wheatley is not quite in the same Literary League but as a teenager, that did not concern me. I devoured his novels voraciously.

I must have realised that Mr Wheatley's fiction left something to be desired because by the time I was seventeen, I was reading the classics of the genre: Bram Stoker's Dracula, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Mrs Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho.

I didn't think about writing this kind of fiction myself, or any kind of fiction for that matter, but all reading is reference, a conscious or unconscious resource lodged in the mind to be used at a later date.

I didn't become a writer until I was an adult. I was an English teacher in a secondary school when I began writing and it seemed natural to write for teenagers. Not just because I taught them and knew them, but I liked the same kind of fiction they did. Perhaps a part of me had never grown up. I began by writing crime thrillers. Then I saw Francis Ford Coppola's film,  Bram Stoker's Dracula. I came out of the cinema knowing that I wanted to write a book about a vampire. My current publisher didn't want me to do it, so I found a publisher who did.  I re-read Dracula. I'd last read it when I was seventeen.  I remember being seriously scared by it (and I don't scare easily) but I'd forgotten that it is entirely written as a series of 'found' documents: diaries, letters, reports of various sorts. This kind of metafictional device was what interested me now, that and how small, unsettling details scare people (if I was going to write in this genre, I had a craft to learn). I decided to set my vampire book, Blood Sinister, in two time frames: the Present and the 19th Century (crucially, before Dracula was written in 1897 and preferably about the time of the Ripper Murders - why stop at one gothic horror when one could have two?). The 19th Century episodes would be written in the form of a diary that would be discovered and read by a girl living now. A girl with a serious blood condition who is staying with her grandmother who just happens to live opposite Highgate Cemetery...

This was my first excursion into the Gothic and also my first serious attempt at writing historical fiction. I really enjoyed writing in both genre. I moved on from gothic 'horror' fiction but most of my subsequent fiction has been tinged with it because I still find it interesting. Witch Child dealt with witchcraft and witch persecution, transatlantic emigration and european interaction with native peoples but it is written in the form of a 'found' journal and has slightly more than a hint of potent and active folk magic. Pirates! has a diabolic villain in the form of Bartholome, the Brazilian, and his totemic ruby necklace.

I made a more thorough excursion into the realms of the Gothic when I was writing Sovay. I set the novel in 1794, the year Mrs Radcliffe published Udolpho.  Quite apart from the gothic excesses of the French Revolution and the city gothic of 18th Century London, I wanted my heroine to spend at least some of her time in a gothic abbey, Thursley, based on the fabulous Fonthill which was built by the wonderfully eccentric William Beckford who wrote gothic novels and was so stupendously wealthy that he built his very gothic pile to such exaggerated and monstrous proportions that the 300 ft tower fell down three times. I wanted her to undergo suitably gothic experiences there before escaping, as all truly gothic heroines do, so that she might wreak suitable revenge on her dastardly foe.

I have a feeling that whatever I am writing, the Gothic will be there somewhere. It is hard to escape  one's roots and the ideas and images that have always fed one's imagination and will continue to do so. The Gothic is part of history, just as history is part of the Gothic.