![]() ![]() There seems barely time to contemplate the afterlife when everyone’s so busy trying to escape the traps laid for them on earth-traps set by heredity and fate. ![]() Any benefits to leading a religious life seem to be completely erased in these stories, with paranoia and persecution complexes to take their place. These are stories that couldn’t exist outside a culture obsessed with sin and hellfire, and yet they’re not morality tales: the only lesson to be drawn from most gothic romances is that the supernatural can be easily substituted for the divine. Gothic horror usually revolves around the sinister absence of God inside some religious framework. How well, really, do any of my favorite works hold up? Is The Castle of Otranto actually good, or just campy? Is The Monk great literature? Probably not-but as genres go, there’s none quite so pleasingly ridiculous as this one. ![]() The reluctance comes from never quite knowing if it’s a genre worth caring about. I have long been a rather reluctant fan of gothic horror. From the Penguin Classics edition of Melmoth. ![]()
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