Gothic Literature
A place for devotees of Maturin and Le Fanu, Radcliffe and Lewis, Dacre and Walpole, Poe and Blackwood, Brown and Lovecraft, Machen and Bierce, Stoker, Beckford, Shelley, Jackson, the Bronte sisters, and all the rest.
Those who prefer the mystic to the mundane and the fervid to the bloodless—those who can see the fever in the gloom and detect the delicate irony in the shadow of overwhelming dread—those who are not afraid of the brooding, pernicious cynicism that is so often the mark, or perhaps the stain, of genius: this is your group.
Where the ruins of forgotten glamours, the trappings of cobwebs and myrrh-reeking evils, meet the surprisingly modern interpretations of past inspirations—darker inspirations—a tradition of tempering the cerebral with the macabre continues to exist. The Gothic defies categorization: always fresh, always dated, always derivative, always defiantly inventive, always drivel, always absolute gold. Distinct from any other major literary movement in its bizarre capacity for allowing us to marry our inner literary snob with our inner patron of what a certain outrageously popular contemporary author once deemed 'good trash,' the Gothic constantly propels us forward as much as it beckons us back.
And so, to those many acolytes who bow at the altar where the romantic worships the repulsive, and the world is never quite what it seems, please join me in discussing and appreciating that curious genre that glosses reality as much as it illuminates the latent horror all around us, and the still more sinister things waiting within us.
(A note to new members: if you're interested in joining our fairly loquacious little reading group, please feel free to comment on older threads as well as our featured story/poem/whatever. For example, just because we finished 'The Fall of the House of Usher' quite a ways back doesn't mean we wouldn't all love to hear what somebody new has to say...)
