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.

Fact or Fiction: Are Vampires Real?

Raise the stakes with this all encompassing guide on all things vampires.

Author: Leah Hall, for Country Living

It's not your imagination: Vampires are everywhere. They're in vampire movies (hello, Interview with the Vampire) and all over television (we see you, The Vampire Diaries). They're the subject of countless books. (Twilight may have spawned a million vampiric copy cats, but if you want to get good and scared, try a classic: Stephen King's Salem's Lot.)

Hunger For the Marvelous: The Vampire Craze in the Computer Age

This summer may have been the season of bats and Batman, but the rest of the year belongs to the vampire. If pop culture's current preoccupation forecasts what to expect from the '90s, we're in for a lively time.

Little did anyone know when Anne Rice first published Interview with the Vampire in 1976 that it would grow into a trilogy (The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned) that has sold millions. Or that it would spawn an invasion of the undead and raise some interesting questions about why the computer generation has such a fascination with getting its bytes the old-fashioned way.

Das Vampir

Reading the most recent Anita Blake novel has made me ponder vampire series. Nothing is more prevalent in horror literature ­ with a few notable exceptions (King's Salem's Lot, Brite's Lost Souls, and Brust's Agyar being the most notable ones), almost every vampire novel has spawned sequels. And, perhaps in keeping with traditional vampire mythology, the sequels, like the vampiric progeny, tend to get progressively weaker, until we're left with the literary equivalent of George Hamilton in Love at First Bite.

But there are a few vampire series that, even if they peak at the first book, provide enough entertainment throughout the series to be worthwhile. These series only have two things in common ­ they have vampires as major characters, and they all contain five books or fewer. The second wasn't a rule I had when choosing the series, but it turns out that, as with almost any other series, familiarity breeds contempt, and even much more talented authors than Laurell K. Hamilton and Anne Rice (and all the authors I list are much more talented than those two) would have had trouble keeping series fresh beyond that number.

Dracula and Frankenstein: A Tale of Two Monsters

[This article is a slightly revised chapter from Reflections on Dracula, published by Transylvania Press in 1997. Sections of the chapter were previously published by Greenwood Press in Visions of the Fantastic (1996).]



“I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind, and endowed with the will and power to effect purposes of horror - my own vampire.” (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 73)