Your First Gothic Novel

Honors Brit. Lit.

Fall 2008

Imagine that you’ve just gotten out of college and that you’ve met a guy, who knows a guy, who is looking for writers of horror fiction.  It seems that the latest literary craze is the rebirth of small press Gothic Novels.  The local books stores are all competing to find and recruit plot-boiler writers who can feed this market.  (It is the literary equivalent of microbrews and artisanal  bread bakers).  Because you desperately want to be a writer—after all, isn’t that what all English Majors want to be—you tell this guy an elaborate story about how you understand the literary conventions of the Gothic as it developed from its inception with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto through the Romantic version of the Gothic typified by Shelley’s Frankenstein  up to the Victorian Gothic in works like Stoker’s Dracula, Jewel of the Seven Stars, and The Lair of the White Worm.  You cap off this riff with a comment about how even the most decorated of American authors from William Faulkner to the Nobel-Prize-winning Toni Morrison depend heavily on a Gothic grammar that relies on just a few key elements. 

(You realize as you spin out this yarn that you may need to brush up on some of these elements before you actually begin writing your novel.  You make a mental note to yourself that when you do your background research you really should write up a formal MLA bibliography with appropriate annotations so that you can keep all your information organized and ready for use when you begin writing your story. )

            The guy is duly impressed and says that if you can get him the first three to five pages of a novel, his publisher might be willing to publish it serially—like Dickens did.  What he needs from you are the first few pages (the first few pages really must grab the reader if this serial thing is going to work) and a short methodology explaining what your novel does with the Gothic conventions you’ve outlined.  This methodology should only be a single-spaced page, but it should nevertheless be specific about three key elements.

            1.  How you use the fantastic and its related literary phenomena—the marvelous

                        and the uncanny.

            2.  How some version of Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime works in

your book.

            3.  A discussion about how you intend to suspend the reader’s disbelief. 

The key is that he needs the writing quickly—time is of the essence in these fickle, trendy, literary markets.  Both pieces need to be emailed (in a Microsoft Word attachment) to his publisher (a persnickety old English teacher with a small printing press in his garage.  It is rumored that he includes a little of his own blood with the pure India ink he uses to print his evil little books) at homework4mrlister@gmail.com by Thursday, October 2 before the stroke of midnight.  Oh, don’t forget to include an appropriately marketable title.