Gothic literature is such a fascinating genre. But what fascinates me most about it aren't the dark atmospheres, the suspenseful tones, or the spine-tingling twists. But the mere fact that a genre defined by its obsession with class and sexuality, and a battle between humanity and unnatural forces within an oppressive, inescapable, and bleak landscape, should favor (arguably) the least oppressed among us—namely the straight, white, old-money, mega wealthy.
This centuries old tradition was overdue for a reckoning. And the 2020's have delivered with a boom of not just BIPOC voices, but BIPOC women examining what Gothic literature—ideas of monsterhood and otherhood—looks like through their eyes. And I'd argue that these intersecting identities have begun to fundamentally change the way Gothic stories are told...Also this a review of The Last Tale of the Flower Bride because, let's face it, that's what you're really here for.
This is Why Fairy Tales are Dangerous.
The first time I'd become truly enamored with the allure of Gothic stories was 2015's Crimson Peak. The Guillermo Del Toro directed, Mia Wasikowska/Tom Hiddleston starring film is brimming with sexual passion, dark secrets and all the mutton-sleeve dresses a girl could want...swoon. There are monsters (supernatural and human), yet the gigantic emotions are the most terrifying thing onscreen. There's an opera to the feels, and a blinking signal from frame one that there's no place for grounded realism in this (haunted) house.
Enamored, my post Crimson Peak self came to appreciate the likes of Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allen Poe, and Oscar Wilde and I began a shallow dive into the Gothic genre as a whole—how it came to be, and in the centuries since, how it's evolved, flourished, and continues to thrive.
The first work of Gothic fiction is believed to be Horace Walpole’s dark, foreboding The Castle of Otranto. Written in 1764, the tale of medieval dynastic and sexual politics opens with a Prince being crushed to death on his wedding day. (Walpole wasn't messing around.) Like many early works of Gothic fiction, there's a heavy focus on morality, philosophy, and religion, with the "evil" often serving as a metaphor for temptation.
In 1818, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s debut novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, marked a shift in Gothic fiction by changing the typical gothic villain from an evil man or supernatural creature into a physical embodiment of human folly, a motif that would continue throughout the genre's Victorian revival.
In the Victorian era, penny dreadful serials made fiction more widely accessible, and titles like Varney the Vampire—interestingly the first work to feature vampires with fangs—introduced many of the tropes and settings that are now most associated with Gothic lit. It was during this time that works like The Woman in White (1859), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Dracula (1897) all dealt with duality and duplicity, and what it means to be truly human. Even as the genre moved away from traditional settings and toward more contemporary locations, such as the haunted house featured in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) or the Bramford apartment building in Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967), the tentpoles of Gothic fiction would remain; a haunted place—though the specters need not be ghosts—supernatural events, visions or synchronicities that serve as omens, high emotion, and a person, usually a young, beautiful woman, who becomes the central focus of the unexplained.
At its root, Gothic literature speaks to our fear and fascination with the unknown. And like any good genre, it's adaptive. So it's no surprise that BIPOC authors have embraced the Gothic too. And though early on it was usually in forms less immediately recognizable than your typical tales of pale women in nightgowns fleeing monsters in a manor, we're now seeing a return to form. Only now the woman in question is far less vulnerable, far from a damsel, and considerably less pale.
There is Always a Peculiar Distance to Fairy Tales.
No conversation about modern Gothic literature would be complete without mentioning Silvia Moreno-Garcia's Mexican Gothic (2020), a novel that gives the genre of women-running-from-houses a triumphant spin. All of the classic Gothic beats are here: the young heroine invited to stay in a creepy house, the family with dark secrets, a family member who's insane, or thought to be, and various eerie goings-on that may or may not be psychological. But Moreno-Garcia doesn't just blow the dust off old conventions; instead, she expertly crafts every genre element she touches, using the old Gothic standards as a way to explore the social tensions running throughout the story’s setting. Ghosts as metaphor for sin or the unknown is replaced by ghosts as manifestations of the past intruding on the present.
Like Moreno-Garcia, Isabel Cañas makes her own connections between past and present. Her novel, The Hacienda, set just after the Mexican War for Independence, follows Beatriz on the hunt for a husband who will elevate her status and protect her mother from persecution. When she finds him, strange happenings at her new estate and rumors of hauntings threaten to derail her new life. And a sexy local priest who moonlights as a witch is her only hope of survival. It's a unique take on the lush, the beautiful, and the haunted, and completely deserving of the Rebecca comparisons it often receives.
Some notable Black authored novels are also taking this motif and rolling with it. Like Tiffany Jackson's White Smoke (2021), a YA The Haunting of Hill House meets Get Out, that follows Marigold and her blended family who move into a beautifully renovated home in the midwest only to find out that the house, the street, and even the town itself, has secrets. And at its core, it's a novel that manages to turn themes of gentrification and mass incarceration into the most terrifying horrors imaginable. And Alexis Henderson's House of Hunger (2022), a reimagining of the Elizabeth Bathory story, is a sexy, sapphic, monstrous and very bloody vampire-adjacent tale of a young woman drawn into the upper echelons of a society, a place where blood is power. Though it's not technically about vampires—the novel never defines the strange Northerners who only travel by night, drink blood, and party until dawn—this one could definitely give Anne Rice a run for her money.
Because so many Gothic classics feature the passive, helpless woman unable to escape or even negotiate with the confines of her existence, it's no surprise contemporary dark tales strive to give female characters more agency. Sunyi Dean’s mesmerizing debut, The Book Eaters (2022), for example, focuses heavily on motherhood, monstrosity and domestic violence. The novel’s protagonist, Devon, is a survivor of domestic abuse and a "book eater"—a creature that literally consumes books for sustenance. Raised on a steady diet of fairytales and romantic notions, Devon slowly starts to question the stories she been consuming.
And Rivers Solomon's (a non-binary author and therefore not a woman, but mentioning because, well, this my piece) Sorrowland (2021), a more political take on the modern American Gothic novel, tells the story of a girl named Vern who escapes from a cult commune, gives birth to twins alone in the forest, and goes on a journey of queer self-discovery and motherhood. Sorrowland brilliantly examines the U.S.’s relationship to queerness, Blackness, and its native people, all through a terrifying Gothic lens. If you go on to read one book from this piece, read Sorrowland.
The Secret to Everlasting Love Was Fear.
And then there's The Last Tale of the Flower Bride (2023), Roshani Chokshi's alluring tale of a scholar known only as “the bridegroom” who meets the mysterious, fabulously wealthy Indigo Maxwell-Casteñada. Almost immediately, he and Indigo embark on a whirlwind romance fueled by their mutual love of stories. But despite her passion for him, Indigo keeps the bridegroom at a distance, making him promise never to dig into her past. But when Indigo receives a message that the aunt who raised her is dying, she and the bridegroom return to her childhood home, the House of Dreams, a mansion bursting with Indigo’s secrets, making it harder and harder for the bridegroom to keep that promise.
This is my first Chokshi novel, and I sincerely doubt it'll be my last because damn, girl can tell a story. You can tell from the first paragraph on the first page that every word, every sound the words form, have been carefully, delicately chosen. Like my introduction to the genre—Crimson Peak—the story exists outside the bounds of any recognizable reality. But then, that's the point. All the Gothic trappings are here: the outsider brought into an alien world of opulence and affluence, secrets on secrets on secrets, a house as a character, figures that appear and disappear..were they ever really there?
The narration is split between two characters: one is simply known as the Bridegroom and the other is Azure, a childhood friend of the less than forthright Indigo, and both with their own unique relationships to her. Though not without their similarities. Both relationships are borne of secrets and games. With Azure, Indigo would rather indulge in fantasies of the world of Faerie than face reality. And with the Bridegroom, Indigo communicates almost exclusively through myths and fairytales. And slowly—though perhaps too slow for some—the childhood home Indigo returns to begins to whisper transgressions of the past, unearthing what once transpired between two young girls, and the truth of his wife the bridegroom must now face.
More than a send-up of classic Gothic stories, Flower Bride is also an ode to fairytales, the Grimm kind, in all their dark and beautiful forms. It mirrors tales where girls are mistreated (Azure's stepfather looks at her with lust), promised happily ever afters, yet never warned of the cost of such endings. Galvanized by such lyrical prose, Chokshi effortlessly draws the reader into the steep price each of our characters must pay. And by the end, I felt like I just woke from a fever dream I would've happily, voluntarily remained trapped in. 4/5 ⭐
A Fairy Tale is Nothing More Than a Sense of Hope.
As the Gothic continues to evolve, I hope we'll continue to see works that not only redefine the norms, but bring the genre to a place it's rarely been allowed to go before, pulling from the familiar without being constrained by them. It certainly makes these modern takes less pleasingly predictable, but I'm not complaining. After all, we are living in a time when we (womxn) regularly face down horrors and ghosts of our own. This new era of Gothic lit might just be the salve we need to help us see a path forward. For where there is darkness, there is also..the blood of our enemies.