My latest novel, The Fourth Princess, is a Gothic novel set in Old Shanghai – not the usual location. Gothic novels feature easily
identifiable tropes: a crumbling castle, a young woman in danger, a dangerous secret and plenty of bleak atmosphere. The stories usually take place in a Western European setting, preferably a location with bad weather for maximum bleakness. But when transported to an unexpected time and place, the challenge is for a Gothic novel to take advantage of its unique setting to refresh the genre, with characters, dangers and dilemmas that are possible only in this specific time and place. Here are 8 other novels that make the most of unexpected and unique settings.
Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay
1900s Australia. Three girls and a teacher vanish while on a Valentine’s Day school picnic in the Australian bush. Search parties climb the Rock, parents rush to take their daughters out of the school and despair leads to suicides. Relentlessly clear blue skies and vast landscapes make for an unlikely Gothic setting, yet the exquisite prose of this short novel exudes claustrophobia: the inescapable cruelty of the girls boarding school, the oppressive heat outdoors and Hanging Rock itself, guardian of ancient secrets.
The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo
1930s British Malaya. Ren, a servant boy, has been sent on a quest to find his dead master’s missing finger and he must succeed within forty-nine days if his master’s spirit is to rest in peace. Ji Lin is a dressmaker who secretly works as a dance hall girl to make ends meet – and then a dance partner accidentally leaves her a severed finger. Ji Lin and Ren eventually cross paths at a hospital where mysterious deaths bring frightened whispers of a were-tiger. With writing as lush and dreamlike as the tropical background, this is a layered story of cultures, superstitions, envy and madness.
The Fabled Earth by Kimberly Brock
1930s – 1950s Georgia. In 1932, two young men drown during a party on secluded Cumberland Island, home to holiday mansions of the wealthy. The drownings change forever the lives of two young women, Cleo and Joanna. Joanna never returns to Cumberland Island but Cleo stays on. Twenty years later, Joanna dies and her daughter comes to Cumberland Island. The truth of what happened 20 years ago begins to unfurl amidst the tensions of a small Southern town coping with desegregation and economic change.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
1950s Mexico. Noemi’s cousin Catalina married Virgil Doyle, an Englishman who lives in a remote part of Mexico. A distressing letter from Catalina sends Noemi to the Doyle home, a damp and deteriorating mansion near a small mountain town, perpetually closed in by fog. The Doyles, as she learns, harbor a family history of incest, madness and violence, from which the cousins must escape or lose their lives.
Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia
1980s – 1990s, the Catskills, New York. Minnie Graves, part of a bridal party staying at the posh Bellweather Hotel, witnesses a murder-suicide in Room 712. Fifteen years later, she returns to the no-longer-grand hotel just in time for a blizzard to trap her there, along with hundreds of high school students attending a music festival. Then one of the young musicians vanishes – from Room 712. If you don’t think Gothic can mix well with wit and teenage angst, you need to read this.
Little by Edward Carey
1790s Revolutionary France, a house of wax. In Switzerland, orphaned Marie, the “Little” of the title, apprentices with the eccentric Doctor Curtius, who makes wax models of body parts for the hospital. Curtius loses his job so they travel to Paris, where their landlady discovers, then uses, their talents to make wax busts of prominent Parisians, charging admission to the curious. But as the French Revolution progresses to the Reign of Terror, their lucrative business turns macabre, as revolutionaries demand they make busts of the beheaded from death masks taken off the guillotine. Their home turns into a house of horrors. A fictionalized tale of the woman who would one day become Madame Tussaud.
Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje
1980s and ’90s Sri Lanka. Beneath this historical novel lurks a Gothic tale. Anil Tissera is a forensic anthropologist who returns to her native Sri Lanka to help investigate evidence of disappeared people from the civil war. Anil and her colleague find a skeleton they nickname “Sailor” and try to identify him. Their discovery could implicate the government of political murder, putting them in danger. The prose is poetic and haunting, almost hallucinatory, as the story moves between a wartime hospital to an abandoned mansion, to an old ship being used as a forensic lab.
The Glass Woman by Caroline Lea
1680s Iceland. Rósa is unmarried and poor, with no prospects in her rural village, so she agrees to marry the trader, Jón, who takes her back to his home. There, the superstitious villagers are hostile to her, and soon she hears whispers about Jón’s first wife, who died. Or was murdered. And Jón forbids her to look in the attic. Rósa feels trapped, but she’s also determined to work out what’s behind the rumours and what’s in the secret room upstairs. Even wide open, snow-covered landscapes can be claustrophobic when it’s Gothic.
