Genres
Gothic fiction
A literary aesthetic of fear and haunting, where the past intrudes on the present amid ruins, persecution and family secrets.
Gothic fiction, often referred to as Gothic horror in the 20th century, is a literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. Its signature is the past intruding on the present: ruined castles, monasteries and crypts; vengeful persecution, imprisonment and murder; live burials, doubles, family secrets and dreams. Its narratives are convoluted by design, with tales-within-tales, shifting narrators and found manuscripts. Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) is the first Gothic novel; Frankenstein and Dracula are its descendants on the shelf.
Gothic motifs remain horror's standard furniture, and in modern terms the family secret plus the found manuscript are secrets and reveals plus a framing narrator, which makes the mode an exercise in information control that rewards a careful story bible.