Why we are living in 'Gothic times'?

There is a surge in goth-lit that channels our fears and anxieties. Hephzibah Anderson explores how the genre's past and new stories delve deep into disorder and darkness.

"We live in Gothic times," declared Angela Carter back in 1974. It's a theme Carlos Ruiz Zafón took up several decades later: "Ours is a time with a dark heart, ripe for the noir, the gothic and the baroque", he wrote in 2010. Both authors had good reason. The Gothic has always been about far more than heroines in Victorian nightgowns, trapped in labyrinthine ancestral homes, and along with the supernatural, its imaginings probe power dynamics and boundaries, delving deep into disorder and duality.

America's Restless Vampires

Thousands of our American ancestors were killed by vampires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1800, vampires could be blamed for nearly one-quarter of all deaths in North America and vampires remained the leading cause of death throughout the nineteenth century. This vampire did not resemble the clever Count Dracula of Bram Stoker's imagination; this vampire's cloak of invisibility was its smallness. It was so tiny that it could not be seen with the naked eye, which may explain its success as a mysterious killer. The mystery was solved in 1882, the year that Edward Koch announced his discovery of the tuberculosis bacillus. America's vampires actually were—germs!

Vampires

No creature haunting Western society's collective imagination has proven more enduring, more compelling, or more alluring than the vampire. But it was only with the his transformation from emaciated, plague-carrying "nosferatu" (literally, "not dead") to suave, sexually appealing anti-hero that the vampire's status as pop cultural icon was assured.

The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar

Edgar Allan Poe’s story, first printed in 1845, illustrating Poe’s active imagination, originality, and an eager interest in hypnotism -- referred to as mesmerism during that time period. In this essay, a study in hypnotism goes terribly wrong -- and was so believed at the time that it lead to a London publication preaching the consequences of performing “Mesmerism in Articulo Mortis.” (Poe loved a good joke!)

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Of course I shall not pretend to consider it any matter for wonder, that the extraordinary case of M. Valdemar has excited discussion. It would have been a miracle had it not—especially under the circumstances. Through the desire of all parties concerned, to keep the affair from the public, at least for the present, or until we had further opportunities for investigation—through our endeavors to effect this—a garbled or exaggerated account made its way into society, and became the source of many unpleasant misrepresentations; and, very naturally, of a great deal of disbelief.