New post time at Gothic Charm School!

[cupcake_goth]

An Assortment Of Questions And Answers.

Thanks are owed, as always, to the Finishing School of Flail, staxxy, and maiaarts, who are the best beta readers I could ever ask for.

If you lovely folks could help spread the word about the new post, that would be very helpful. Thank you!

Comments

[caleidescopeyes.livejournal.com]

I've given the new post a little shout-out on Twitter, as always.

[juushika.livejournal.com]

I know you asked for emails, would you perchance mind a few non-supernatural gothic book recommendations comments here?

The Mysteries of Udolpho, Ann Radcliffe
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street/The String of Pearls (if, you know, murder etc is okay where the supernatural is not)
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
Let's Kill Uncle by Rohan O'Grady, maybe (it's a bit more dark comedy than all-on gothic)
In the Woods and The Likeness by Tana French (murder mysteries, but hugely atmospheric)
Rebecca by Daphne du Marier

Such a precise/obscure book request intirgues me ... I'd love to see what others can dig up.

[rocket-jockey.livejournal.com]

Some authors your reader who wishes to avoid supernatural elements yet still read "dark romance" may want to consider are:

Charlotte Bronte, esp. Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte, esp. Wuthering Heights
John Keats
Jane Austen (Northanger Abbey is about a girl who thinks the world is just like a Gothic novel)
Victor Hugo
Sir Walter Scott
Lord Byron
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Collette
Lewis Carroll
Horace Walpole
Anne Radcliffe
Baroness Orczy
William Faulkner
Eudora Welty
Margaret Atwood

These authors used dark romace elements, though some of them also have supernatural stories, too.

[agentclaudia.livejournal.com]

Do they have to be fiction books? I've found a few nonfiction books, particularly history books, that are at least as creepy and weird as fiction, and some have pretty strong narrative arcs, too. I'd particularly recommend Kate Summersale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, about the Road Hill House murder. I also liked John Kelley's The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time and Death: A History of Man's Obsessions and Fears by Robert Wilkins. They're, um... not exactly silly-fun-gothy; definitely more on the "fascinatingly morbid and/or disgusting" end.

For fiction, I'd also recommend anything by any of the Brontes, including Anne, who everyone forgets about. Thomas Hardy is also good for that melancholy, atmospheric, dark 'n' depressing English moor romance kind of thing where everybody dies at end. Also Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm, which makes fun of them splendidly.

"Sensation novels" from 1860s England--Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, that sort of thing. Lots of mystery and melodrama, occasionally borrowing earlier "gothic novel" tropes for atmosphere, but overall they're detective stories and as such have no use for anything supernatural.

In a more modern vein, I'd recommend Carlos Luis Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, a very tragic and atmospheric sort of mystery novel that feels like it's going to tip over into magical realism at any moment, but doesn't.

[zmayhem.livejournal.com]

More non-supernatural but either Gothy or Goth-adjacent novels:

Any of Joan Aiken's children's books; they're full of horribly abused but brave orphans, creaky old mansions with secret passageways and dank alt-Victorian London neighborhoods where the sun never shines, but all the evil is purely, dreadfully human. Because they're children's books they do always end happily, so if she's looking for uninterrupted gloom they may not satisfy her, but they're just beautifully written and lush and atmospheric.

Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events - again, very neo-alt-Victorian Goth adjacent, 100% human evil.

Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan and Gormenghast.

Most of Dickens, as long as she avoids the short stories, which are almost always explicitly ghost stories. The richest and twistiest ones I can think of are Great Expectations, Bleak House and Dombey and Son.

And if she wants to go more adjacent than Goth, with touches of steampunk, Tanith Lee's Piratica is a grand, glorious, purely human swashbuckling tale with a dreamy Ice Age-ish London, a shabby theatrical troupe and a marvelous heroine.

I'd actually advise against Wuthering Heights, or recommend it only with a warning -- IIRC, it's quite clearly haunted and ghostly.

[staysonpaper.livejournal.com]

I'd actually advise against Wuthering Heights, or recommend it only with a warning -- IIRC, it's quite clearly haunted and ghostly.

I read it recently, and it's really ghostly only in tone. There is a bit where the narrator dreams of what is essentially Catherine's ghost, but that's the only bit that could really be taken as supernatural as such. And the text comes with its own quasi-believable handwave for that built in.

Of course, I may be forgetting something.