Morgan Dante: Queer, Sensuous, Moody, and Melancholy (And Especially Angst)

Morgan, a lover of Gothic lit and vampires, writes about love, tenderness, body horror, and hunger. ​I met them this past weekend at the Atlanta Sci-Fi Expo and was immediately drawn to her covers. The first pages I read didn't disappoint either. Their specialties are romance, horror, and fantasy, and their work blends Gothic romance with eroticism and dark and devastating religious motifs. They enjoy writing queer, sensuous, moody, and melancholy stories with complicated characters, and they especially like angst and hurt/comfort.

Tell us a bit about your most recent work.

My most recent book, Sacrament, is an M/M/M dark vampire romance that takes place in 1898 Paris and features a complicated, bisexual polycule between three men. The main character deals with the dark, somewhat clandestine world of vampires. It was released on Valentine's Day.

What are the themes and subjects you tend to revisit in your work?

Because I am a trans, queer author who always writes queer characters, I tend to explore themes about identity and being accepted for who you are, no matter how the rest of the world perceives you. Characters who would usually be marginalized or deemed monstrous are portrayed sympathetically. They contend with trauma and find comfort and acceptance, although the road isn't always easy or straightforward.

What happened in your life that prompted you to become a writer? 

I have always written. I think I wrote my first (very short) story when I was in first grade. I remember writing an adventure for a fourth grade creative writing assignment and the teacher recognizing that I was good at writing, and I've always had the desire to keep creating stories and sharing them with others.

[Link] Gothic Fiction with a Twist

by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore

When most people think of gothic fiction, they envision a heroine dashing through a crumbling manor in middle of nowhere England, chased by the ghosts of her lover’s past, one as rife with secrets as the holes in her moth-eaten gown.

19th and 20th century classics such as Bronte’s Jane Eyre, du Maurier’s Rebecca, and Austen’s Northanger Abbey come to mind, as well as monster gothics like Shelley’s Frankenstein and Stoker’s Dracula. Many in non-publishing tend to believe the genre is as dead as these authors, maybe excepting fans of Guillermo del Toro’s 2015 gothic masterpiece Crimson Peak. 

When I tell my non-publishing friends about my new book, The Haunting of Moscow House, a gothic horror set in post-Revolutionary Moscow, their first question is WHY. Why gothic fiction? Why write such a story at all? First of all, why not gothic fiction? 

It doesn’t have to be the same old iteration, though that can be delightful in its own way. After all, the genre is more relevant to us now more than ever. Gothic fiction and, more broadly, horror, shows us the darkness within ourselves and our worlds. And since our world today seems very dark indeed, it reflects our deepest, greatest fears, our most insecure vulnerabilities as humans. It horrifies, it entrances, it romances, it invites escape, all in equal measure. Like other genres, gothic fiction doesn’t need to be static. It can change with the times, encompassing our modern realities, sensitivities, and preoccupations. And it has.

Read the full article: https://crimereads.com/gothic-fiction-with-a-twist/

[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/

[Link] Darkest New England: What is the Northern Gothic Literary Tradition?

by W.S. Winslow

Darkness. Madness. Specters. Death. Add some menacing weather, a tortured anti-hero and a long-buried secret or two and you’ve got the makings of a fine old Gothic novel in the tradition of Jane Eyre or The Hunchback of Notre Dame, big, chewy tales that roll right up to the precipice of horror but stop just short, lingering instead in the realm of Europe’s Dark Romanticism. Cross the line into horror and you leave the gloom of Manderley and Wuthering Heights for the hallucinogenic terror of The Castle of Otranto, Dracula’s Transylvania or Doctor Jekyll’s lab.

American fiction has its own Gothic tradition. Best known is the southern version, set not in cathedrals, castles and moors, but amidst the decrepit plantations and enduring ruin of the Civil War. Whereas the Southern Gothic is draped in Spanish moss, surrounded by cotton fields and oppressed by summer swelter, the Northern Gothic was born of cold and Calvinism, isolation and endurance, rooted not in the horrors of slavery and a fetishized myth of southern gentility, but the sharp, hard edge of fundamentalist Protestantism and the hopelessness of predestination. It’s the Salem of Goodman Brown, Poe’s House of Usher, and Ambrose Bierce’s Owl Creek Bridge.

Despite the general decline of organized religion in recent years, cultural Puritanism persists in much of New England and is foundational to its history. Ever since the European invasion of the New World, the roots of that belief system have been snaking underfoot, pushing so deep into the ground that they nearly choked out other traditions: those of the First People, later arrivals from Catholic Europe and French-speaking Canada, and the Black and Brown descendants of the Great Migration. If you like your literature fraught with doom, New England is a good place to find it.

I ought to know. My own family is descended from the earliest settlers in the New World and has been living in Maine since the beginning of the 18th century. Most of our people were Puritans, but there were also some French Canadians and Quakers, the latter contributing a marked strain of intransigence to a bloodline already amply endowed with it. Starting in Salem Town the historical record of my family includes a litany of contrarian behavior that resulted in fines, periodic imprisonment and occasional flogging, which is why, I suppose, a couple of generations after they disembarked in Massachusetts, my forebearers started moving steadily north to un- or sparsely inhabited places in what later became Maine. And here we have stayed for ten generations.

Read the full article: https://lithub.com/darkest-new-england-what-is-the-northern-gothic-literary-tradition/

Gothic Traditions and the Contemporary Genre Writer

Hey, writers! Let's talk about the Gothic traditions. Big, old houses. Creepy relatives. Family secrets that still affect the present... If the success of shows like The Haunting of Bly House and Midnight Mass show us anything, they show us that these tropes are still with us and aren't just limited to old-timey stories. 

What's your history with Gothic stories? Are you a fan, or did you come to them by seeing the stories they influenced in novels and on TV? 

Marian Allen: A friend introduced me to Gothic romances in college: The kind with a heroine in a long dress or a nightgown running in the light of a full moon from a mansion, looking over her shoulder in apprehension. The cover didn't always match the book's contents; they were (the ones my friend passed to me) much more interesting than that. Then there was Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, parts of Frankenstein, parts of Vanity Fair, and other classics influenced by the Gothic tradition. Oh --Rebecca! 

John L. Taylor: I grew up both reading books like The House of Seven Gables and watching old horror films from Universal and Hammer. These are heavily Gothic in their visuals. Also, German expressionist films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari gave me a solid visual influence rooted in Gothic, if distorted imagery. 

Cynthia Ward: I enjoy Gothic fiction in its various iterations, and I've written a gothic horror story (whether or not it's supernatural is left to the reader).

Shannon Murphy: I love old Gothic horror stories! The chilling atmosphere, the spooky plot twists.

Ef Deal: I live in a Gothic house. We were haunted for a few years, and we have had a few things visit us. I grew up with ghosts in my bedroom. Naturally, I gravitated toward Gothic stories. 

Sean Taylor: My first exposure in novels was Dickensian rather than pure Gothic, but from Charles' dusty old mansions it was an easy leap to the worlds of dark romances like Wuthering Heights and The House of the Seven Gables and creepy settings of early horror like Dracula and Frankenstein. My movie and TV habits at the time only reinforced the visuals of a Gothic style and the storytelling motifs of family secrets and isolation from the surrounding villages and towns, thanks to Dark Shadows, Hammer's horror movies, and, of course, Elvira introducing me to lots of Gothic revival B-movies I had been too young to see when they originally hit theaters.  

In what ways have the tropes of Gothic fiction influenced your work? 

Lucy Blue: My latest book, The Devil Makes Three, is a Southern Gothic horror novel -- NOT a romance, though as with most gothic stories, there is a relationship at the center of it. It takes place at Briarwood Plantation, which was deserted in 1837 when the English fiancee of the owner's daughter axe-murdered the entire family. When my book begins in the present day, Briarwood has just been purchased by a bestselling horror novelist, Jacob McGinnas. He's been suffering from writer's block, like you do, and he intends to open it back up to write his masterpiece about the murders and the hauntings they have allegedly inspired. A widowed local librarian, Serena Decatur, is helping him with his research, and together they find out the grisly murders are just the tip of a very nasty iceburg. Briarwood, both the house and grounds (a wilderness that hasn't been touched in almost 200 years), and Saxonville, the small town nearby, are pretty well soaked through with evil that's both human and supernatural. So we've got a grand but ruined haunted house and a whole bunch of creepy family secrets--Serena, a Black woman, discovers she has connections to Briarwood far beyond academic interest. And every horror in the present is rooted somehow in the past. Pretty much everything I've ever written has had some kind of gothic element. I mean, my medieval romances have stuff like vampires and haunted oubliettes, and my westerns have zombies. But The Devil Makes Three is me going full-on Gothic horror.

Ef Deal: Then I read Rebecca and thought WOW, THIS is what real Gothic is. I want to do this! Scary, romantic, a buried secret, a grisly murder, a mystery... And I have tried include them all.

John L. Taylor: It influences my work mainly in the form of descriptions and imagery, but also in the form of having female leads who are often confronted by the supernatural. Also, motifs like family secrets in far-flung locations, old mansions, etc. are a theme I'm toying with in an upcoming short story, though mixed with more cosmic horror tropes. 

Marian Allen: My period (1968) suspense, A Dead Guy at the Summerhouse is basically the opposite of those romances I read in college: The protagonist is a young man, and he tries his damnedest to NOT find out anything about the creepy relatives and their haunting past. Nope, just wants a paycheck, thanks.

Cynthia Ward: If anyone's interested, my story, "The Midwife," is available to read for free at https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/the-midwife/

Sean Taylor: As a pulp, horror, and mystery writer, the idea of family secrets and the past influencing the present negatively are strong elements in my work, even though I rarely set any of my stories in a Gothic mansion. For my superhero fiction back during the days of Cyber Age Adventures, not so much influence at all though. 

How do you see them changing in light of a far more digital world, and do you believe these historically important parts of stories will continue to stick around for new and upcoming writers?

John L. Taylor: I can see these tropes being continued in the digital publishing era, The Gothic story just resonates so well with audiences it is unlikely to fade away yet. Things like gender roles or locations may change, but that visual style will always be reinvented in some form. For a few years now, the Gothic aesthetic has been reduced to a caricature, a cartoon trope. But I believe it's set for a resurgence like the one it had in the early 1990s under Burton and Sonnenfeld's influence.

Sean Taylor: I think the setting that originally defined Gothic traditions will become less and less used,  particularly in contemporary mainstream fiction, but never truly go away. Building on what John said, movies tend to re-visit that at least once during each new generation of filmmakers. I do think that the concepts and themes of Gothic works will continue to inspire stories for years and years to come. We see bits of it in nearly all the works of Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, and even in non-horror works such as Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres and even several works by Joyce Carol Oates.  Horror will always have a place for it, and dark romance as well. But I also feel sure that literary writers too will continue to look for ways to either subvert the tropes or play off them for new effect or to use them as a sort of storytelling shorthand when needed. 

Shannon Murphy: I wrote a Gothic story about a werewolf. I let my Beta reader read it, and he said I should scrap it, that such stories are "out of date." It made me sad, but I think he might be right

Marian Allen: I see no reason for the old tropes to vanish, no matter how the stories are told. There are still foreboding houses of whatever age or size, still family secrets, still creepy relatives. Anything that works will always be with us.

Cynthia Ward: What they might be like in the future, I don't know. Tamsyn Muir's Gideon the Ninth is a recent (and excellent) SF novel that very imaginatively shifts the tropes you mention into space and mixes in necromancers, lesbian swordswomen, and a locked-room mystery.