Guest post written by The Spirit Collection of Thorne Hall author J. Ann Thomas
J. Ann Thomas is the award-winning author of the Asperfell trilogy (written as Jamie Thomas). The Spirit Collection of Thorne Hall is her first adult novel. She teaches Diploma Programme Language and Literature at an International Baccalaureate school in Tacoma, Washington where she lives in a one hundred and twenty-four-year-old house with her husband, two children, and (according to said husband) too many animals. She also holds a masters degree in vocal performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
About The Spirit Collection of Thorne Hall (released February 2025): A young woman forced to live with ghosts in a mansion frozen in time must decide between forbidden love and the price of freedom in this gothic fantasy where Jane Eyre meets The Haunting of Bly Manor, perfect for fans of Starling House.
Ten years ago, a visionary writer and film director drew on a lifelong obsession with Gothic and Neo-Gothic art, literature, and design to produce one of the most quintessential examples of the genre ever to grace the silver screen.
The masterful portrayal of a doomed romance at the turn of the century contains all the necessary elements of the genre: a young, naïve protagonist, a brooding, mysterious hero, a decaying mansion full of ghostly apparitions, and deadly family secrets, the fulfillment of a warning only understood when it is too late.
The director was Guillermo del Toro, and he has described the film, Crimson Peak, as “quintessential del Toro” and one of the best films of his career.
You would be forgiven for not ever having heard of it, even if you adore Gothic romance, because the film’s marketing was so catastrophically inaccurate that audiences left disappointed that there was nothing horrifying about it despite being billed as a horror film, a fact that del Toro himself lamented, believing that Crimson Peak would be doomed if they did not focus instead on the romance or the mystery. He was right. The film underperformed at the box office, and even though del Toro’s dream that the film would find its audience little by little over the years has been somewhat realized, it is still considered a failure by monetary standards.
When Robert Eggers announced his intention to remake the 1929 silent film, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, I feared it would suffer the same fate as Crimson Peak, if not in the way it was marketed then in the way it is interpreted and misunderstood by an audience who were collectively absent the day in high school English class when Mary Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe were being taught.
Sure enough, perplexed viewers found it “slow” and “boring” and “overly atmospheric” and lacking the suspense and thrilling terror they expected in a horror film. Somewhere, Guillermo del Toro sighed and welcomed Eggers to the club.
And the bewildering criticism of the Gothic genre is hardly limited to film. From romance to fantasy, the genre is equally received in written form, which is especially frustrating when one considers how well established the tenets are, beloved tropes that have endured centuries, continuing to unsettle and enchant readers.
As an author of Gothic romance myself with a book newly released on February 11th (The Spirit Collection of Thorne Hall), I rejoiced when Nerd Daily asked me to do a piece on this much misunderstood genre. I could fill pages of dusty, leather tomes lining a library with rain sliding down stained-glass windows while secrets lurk behind hidden passageways, but for the sake of brevity, I will try to distill the sumptuous feast for the senses that is Gothic literature down into a few crucial elements and try not to let my prose runaway with me.
If I am unsuccessful, do forgive me…after all, I am a Gothic novelist.
The genre rose to prominence in the mid seventeen hundreds during a time of intense sexual repression and strict adherence to propriety and manners. This starched, uptight populous were, nevertheless, fascinated with the darkest aspects of human nature, which in Gothic literature manifested in violence, supernatural threats, psychological turmoil, and sexual depravity. By confining them to the page, readers were free to satisfy their curiosity without shame in the same way modern audiences approach horror films: in the relative safety of a respectable distance, though some shame was inevitable, what with Gothic literature’s themes contrasting so intensely with Victorian society’s emphasis on morality and social behavior.
These decadent, degenerate parts of the human psyche were explored in a very specific type of setting and an unrivaled aesthetic that has become synonymous with the genre.
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is only twenty-five pages long, but a significant number of them are dedicated to the description of the house in question, a once-proud manor that, like the family who dwell there, has crumbled into ruin. Poe’s rich, lyrical prose slowly builds the foreboding atmosphere, the crucial establishment of unearthly gloom and despair that permeates every page to follow. The opening paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s “The Haunting of Hill House” is one of the most effective and memorable introductions to a setting in literary history. And when the unnamed narrator of Rebecca begins her tale, it is to recall that in a dream, she “…went to Manderley again,” the ancestral home of the de Winter family whose ruin is detailed through the entirety of the first chapter.
It is often this element of the Gothic genre that is most criticized, accused of being too slow, too descriptive, but it is also the most crucial. The reader must be fully emersed in the setting, aware of its general sense of wrongness, must be unsettled and ill at ease, or the story to follow will not properly unfold with the same impact. To read Gothic literature is to view the setting as a character itself. They are abbeys and castles and mansions with names like Udolpho Castle and Thornfield Hall and Bly Manor, and once they were grand, but the darkness they hold within has taken its toll, stripping away the luster of polished oak floors and marble statues, of heavy velvet drapes and candelabras dripping with gold and crystal. They are often isolated, cut off from the world, heightening the pervasive sense of dread and the inevitability of what is to come. Often there is a crypt or two, and even a graveyard where family secrets never seem to remain buried for long.
Into these lonely, unsettling places the hero or heroine ventures, unaware of the horrors that lie in wait, the intricate web of secrets. Perhaps he is a friend invited for a doomed holiday as in “Usher,” or he might be a solicitor come to conduct business at the castle of a Transylvanian nobleman in the case of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” but most often the visitor is a young, innocent woman, and is meant to embody the reader.
Sometimes she is a governess, hired by a mysterious, rich man, to educate his ward as in the case of Jane Eyre, or to look after his strange children like the nameless protagonist of “The Turn of the Screw” by Henry James. In the case of the former, the attraction between governess and employer is complicated not only by the power dynamic between them, but the secrets Rochester is concealing.
And sometimes she is a bride, newly arrived at the ancestral home of a man she knows shockingly little about, often to disastrous consequence. She is tragically beautiful, emotionally venerable, and prone to melancholy, but she is not without her wit and her wiles. Del Toro’s Crimson Peak heroine, Edith, may have been taken in by the Sharpe siblings’ scheme to obtain her inheritance through poison, but she refuses to become their latest victim, harnessing her own strength as well as the help of the spirits who tormented her in an effort to deliver a dire warning to free herself from certain death.
And although she comes to Manderley under the oppressive shadow of a dead woman determined to destroy her life from the grave, the unnamed protagonist of Rebecca sheds her girlish innocence and blossoms into a worthy adversary in order to save her husband, even if he mourns the loss of her former self, sacrificed to the specter of his former wife.
One crucial thing many Gothic heroines share is her tragically terrible taste in men.
Heathcliff. Edward Rochester. Maxime de Winter.
Mad, bad, and dangerous to know, they are the Byronic hero: Dark, tortured, and haunted by their past yet possessed by a magnetic charisma that draws the heroine in, igniting her repressed sexual desire and yearning to escape the narrow confines of her family and society’s expectations. They are often older, worldly, and wealthy, an irresistible combination for young, impressionable women and she is as equally irresistible to him: her melancholic beauty is a balm for his troubled soul and her love is his redemption, whether he is deserving of it or no. Their romance is doomed from the start, but it is woven into the very fabric of the flowing nightgowns the heroine wears as she flees from almost certain death, and even though she would be better off leaving his windswept figure far behind, we cannot help but fall under their spell, and hope that they escape the clutches of the past and horrors of the present.
Finally, as if the anti-hero were not danger enough to the heroine due to his questionable past and selfish desires, she is also threatened by supernatural forces that lurk around every shadowy corner and secret passageway.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula and its illegal offspring, Nosferatu, traffic in vampires, as does The Fall of the House of Usher, only the latter is ambiguous in its subject. Del Toro’s Allerdale Hall is infested with the ghosts of women murdered for their money, and Bly is haunted by a dead governess and her erstwhile lover, their malicious sights set on her young charges. Gothic literature often traffics in the occult, only in the case of these seances, they are real and not the charades used by Victorian era grifters to scam grieving people out of their coin. Curses abound, as does dark magic, and the hero or heroine is helplessly ensnared, an unwitting sacrifice whose ultimate fate keeps us turning pages far into the night, best enjoyed in front of a roaring fire with a glass of wine while a winter storm rages outside.
All the societal pressures that birthed Gothic art still exists in various forms today. Despite shifting literary trends, the Gothic remains. It is not a relic but a living, breathing entity, waiting to ensnare a new generation within its shadowed embrace. Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, though misunderstood at first, is a testament to the genre’s unyielding influence. The ghosts of the Gothic whisper still, their voices curling through candlelit corridors, beckoning us deeper into the dark.
So turn off your screen, light a candle, and let the shadows draw near. They have many stories to share.
