CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOP Writing the everyday gothic
Kate Collins, whose new book is a chilling update on the haunted house novel, examines how ordinary life can be amplifed to terrifying effect in your fiction
Shrieking spectres. Batinfested castles. Blood dripping from the walls. The Gothic novel can be... dramatic, to say the least. But how often do any of us find ourselves wandering a mansion in a floor-length nightdress carrying a candelabra? Secret passages and vampire visitations are all very well, but where do we turn when we want to create a Gothic setting that’s a little more relatable? Writing the everyday requires a bit of ingenuity: fog-strewn graveyards will only get you so far, so let’s examine what we mean by ‘everyday Gothic’, and how it can be achieved.
Classic Gothic tropes are generally well-known to us, although the sum total is not finite. An isolated setting, domestic unrest, the unreliable narrator, inexplicable events: in short, the everyday Gothic is the unsettling transformation of the familiar into the unknown, or the uncanny. The everyday Gothic has a quality of wrongness that is not always easy to articulate but is deeply felt, if not always by the characters, then certainly by the reader.
A pinch of salt tastes better than a pound of flesh
The essence of writing the everyday Gothic is simplicity. Or, perhaps, restraint. As above, it’s easy enough to shock your reader with wailing banshees and headless monks, but how does one go about transporting the effect of a good Gothic scare into a more normalised setting?
In Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend (a novel in which nothing supernatural happens at all, but is the Gothickiest non-Gothic novel I’ve ever read), an incident is recalled whereby a man’s hat appears in middle of a freshly-made bed, without explanation. The storyteller – a maiden aunt – lives alone with a cat, and has no male friends or male callers, and certainly none during the day upon which the hat appeared. Simply, she made the bed and left the room and, upon entering again only moments later, discovered a dapper trilby set right in the middle of the blanket, neat as you like. No explanation is ever given, either by the maiden aunt or by Tartt, but the image is powerful. And doesn’t it send shivers up your spine?
In my own novel, A Good House for Children, much is made of a door that presents itself as ‘stuck’, either locked fast by a long-lost key or trapped in its frame. Efforts to shoulder it open are unsuccessful and this frustration is mentioned a few times within the narrative, quite casually. So when the protagonist, Orla, wakes one night to find it standing wide open, the effect is chilling. In the grand scheme of everything else that ends up happening in that house, it’s a minor occurrence, but it raises a lot of rather terrifying questions. How has it opened? Why has it opened? Does someone, in fact, have a key? If so, who, and how have they accessed her house? Are they still here?
And if it wasn’t opened by a person... then what else?
TIP: Think about how you are using descriptive language. Too many adjectives can have a ‘numbing’ effect on the reader and simple prose is often much more effective, particularly when describing something unnatural, or frightening. Restraint is just as applicable to how a scene is being written, as much as what is being written.
Home is where the horror is
We’re all familiar with the classic haunted house; old, creaky, full of unquiet spirits spawned from unavenged murders. But this is hardly relatable for most readers; not all of us are lucky enough to live somewhere quite so exciting.
Beyond Black, Hilary Mantel’s 2005 novel about a reluctant medium named Alison, neatly subverts every expectation of what we consider to be a haunted house. Alison lives in a bland new-build on an unfinished estate; absolutely no chance here of a Civil War soldier wandering up and down the staircase. You wouldn’t think a nice new semi with beige carpets and spotlights could be quite so nasty, but Mantel creates something truly grim from the sheer soulless-ness of this mass-produced ‘architecture’. Rather than having too much character, these houses have none (at least, in this novel), and this house sets about demonstrating just how much it resents being occupied by Alison, and by extension, the reader.
The sewer pipes back up into the bathrooms, the carpets begin to rot, no grass grows on the endless sea of mud churned up by the developers. Hasty electrics go rogue and blow the lovely new spotlights, and the ghosts that plague Alison begin to lurk in the dark, dank crevices. We are not welcome here. Mantel shows us the process of decay, of degradation, of a home becoming haunted: in a place constructed for the sole purpose of providing shelter, providing refuge, the reader is made to feel just as unsafe as Alison. Wrongness, indeed.
TIP: Consider the location of your story: what features can be used to demonstrate ‘things going wrong’? What about your location might seem normal at first, but may later become something dangerous, or fearful? What would be your idea of ‘scary’ in this particular setting?
Better the devil you know?
In writing the everyday Gothic, your aim is to first conjure up the emotions of your reader, and then to corrupt them. Call it misdirection, if you like: in order to make your reader feel unsafe, first they must feel safe. We give our reader something to connect with, and then we remove it.
Interpersonal relationships and family dynamics play a key role in
Gothic literature, not least because their breakdown is painful to witness and adds to the swelling atmosphere of ‘things fall apart’. Where better to tap into powerful emotions than a family under strain?
A grisly scene in Sarah Water’s The
Little Stranger is the first indication that something is terribly wrong inside the magnificent but crumbling house at the centre of the novel, Hundreds Hall. The family Labrador, Gyp, is a greying old fellow adored by all, and quickly we become very fond of him. Friendly, waggy, pink-tongued; Gyp is presented to the reader as the quintessential Good Boy, the beating heart of a fracturing family. He is the narrative focal point for normality as things begin to go awry within the house and there is not even the barest hint that he will, later, inflict a horrific facial bite upon a visiting child. Waters implies that Gyp is provoked by the unseen spirit tormenting the house and the brief scene is quite shocking, not least because it is so unexpected.
Gyp, familiar and beloved, has become something Other than himself.
In A Good House for Children, Orla slowly transforms into a mother who is negligent to her children. As she becomes obsessed with the house, and with the idea of keeping her children safe, it distracts her to the point that she is no longer capable of fulfilling her children’s needs – a horrible irony. We meet her as an attentive, involved mother, and she is fundamentally altered by her experience inside the house.
TIP: Think about your characters: who are they at the beginning of the story? How do events change them? How will you show their reactions to what’s happening to them? Pressure and stress provoke all kinds of atypical behaviour, and the best way to convey an atmosphere of fear is to show how your characters respond.
Object impermanence
One of my favourite Gothic tropes is the use of otherwise mundane objects to cause a bit of a stir. Not only does this device encompass the idea of ‘the familiar becoming unfamiliar’, but it can also be deployed using objects that represent the idea of innocence, or affection; an idea which turns quickly sour. Susan
Hill does this quite brilliantly in The Woman in Black, in which various toys come violently to life despite unwound mechanisms and broken parts. Not only is this impossible, but the fact that they are sweet-seeming children’s toys gives greater depth to the atmosphere of ‘wrongness’; something so childlike shouldn’t be so frightening.
This is used to great effect in Rebecca Netley’s The Whistling: a toy fire engine makes a chilling, inexplicable appearance upon the bed of a deceased child, to be discovered by an increasingly terrified governess. This is explained away in the governess’ mind as mischief caused by the remaining child, but the reader knows something far more sinister is afoot.
In A Good House for Children, the disappearance of a painter’s palette knife causes much confusion and when it turns up later somewhere entirely unexpected, this gives the reader a small clue as to the slippery nature of the house itself.
Perhaps because items such as these are so routine, it’s easy for our characters to dismiss these incidents as forgetfulness, or misremembering. If you, for example, found a shoe on the stairs that you thought you’d put away in a cupboard, you would merely decide that you must have only thought you’d put it away, but in fact hadn’t. On the page, the reader can see what the character cannot – we saw them put the shoe away in a cupboard, we know they haven’t misremembered, and thus begins the creeping feeling that something isn’t quite right with this picture. This type of action can be used to show the reader something that the characters can’t yet see, heightening the feeling of helplessness and fear (even if our characters aren’t half as scared as they should be).
TIP: What is there within your location that can be used to signal the uncanny to the reader? What is an object that you find rather boring that could be transformed into something terrifying instead? I always find electrical items suddenly turning themselves on to be really spooky, even if it can be explained by a tripped switch!
The everyday Gothic can be found wherever you choose to look for it – in the black space under a bed, behind a door left slightly ajar, even within a tense or unhappy marriage. Inspiration lurks everywhere!
EXERCISE: Select the most boring object you can think of – maybe it’s a fork, or a tube of toothpaste, or a potted plant – and create a short scene in which this object becomes the focal point for a creepy incident. Think about what this object signifies and how it can be used to conjure up a feeling of ‘wrongness’.
by Kate Collins is published by Serpent’s Tail, £14.99