[Link] Move Over, Poe—The Real Godfather of Gothic Horror Was Nathaniel Hawthorne

The "Scarlet Letter" author's short stories are like a Puritan "Twin Peaks"

Witches’ Sabbath by Francisco Goya

by Adam Fleming Petty

Edgar Allan Poe is generally regarded as the OG of American literature. OG, of course, stands for “Original Goth.” When it comes to the creepy, the weird, and the macabre, Poe takes his place as the grandmaster of the whole black parade. Guillermo del Toro, serving as the series editor of the Penguin Horror line, writes: “It is in Poe that we first find the sketches of modern horror while being able to enjoy the traditional trappings of the Gothic tale. He speaks of plagues and castles and ancient curses, but he is also morbidly attracted to the aberrant intellect, the mind of the outsider.” Del Toro locates Poe as the American conduit for European strains of Gothicism and romanticism, letting loose the fears of the Old World upon the New.

But viewing the emergence of the American Gothic as a transatlantic phenomenon misses more homegrown explorations into the bizarre. A century before H.P. Lovecraft (inspired by Hawthorne’s novel The House of the Seven Gables) depicted New England as a realm of terror and dread, Nathaniel Hawthorne was on the case, mining the region’s history for insights into the mind’s darker corners. Chiefly remembered today for The Scarlet Letter, that bane of high school curricula, Hawthorne’s highest achievements are actually found in his short stories. There, he examines the supposed innocence of the early American character, finding the darkness that lies beneath. 

At roughly the same time that Poe was publishing stories in magazines and periodicals, Hawthorne did the same. (The House of the Seven Gables is unmistakably Gothic, but it was published after Poe established himself as the face of the genre.) Indeed, Poe himself took notice of Hawthorne’s talents. In a review, Poe wrote that “Mr. Hawthorne’s distinctive trait is invention, creation, imagination originality—a trait which, in the literature of fiction, is positively worth all the rest.”

Read the full article: https://electricliterature.com/move-over-poe-the-real-godfather-of-gothic-horror-was-nathaniel-hawthorne/