The Forbidden Family Love (in Gothic Fiction)

Plus, I guess I'm reading romance now?

March is a strange month. A month marked by transitions and false starts, luring you out of hiding with unusual warmth only to punish you with unexpected and sudden frost. And out here at least, the wind is persistent and treacherous, downing telephone polls, stripping your roof, sending your belongings tumbling into the neighbor’s yard.

But March is also Women in Horror Month, which is always a good time! Horror Tree is hosting a ton of great content for the season, as they always do, so be sure to keep an eye out for their interviews and features spotlighting women in the horror space. I sat down with them recently to talk shop as well, so be sure not to miss that :)

As far as other headlines in the horrorsphere for March…

• Eric Raglin’s anthology No Trouble At All, which explores the many facets of polite horror, is still accepting stories through March 15th (with an extended window for marginalized voices), so you’ve got time to sneak yours in there.

• The courts have ruled that a graphic novel created with AI imagery cannot be copyrighted, which is great news for critics of AI. Read up more on that case, if you missed it.

• Speaking of AI, Clarkesworld had to shut down submissions for a while due to being inundated with AI-generated stories, which is a troubling sign for the immediate future of publishing. I could rant about this for a while, but just…come on, guys.

• Blumhouse, indie horror film darling, has expanded into gaming. I will be watching with intrigue to see what comes of this!

• Darklit Press is now accepting submissions of novels and novellas for next year. Go give them a peek to see if they’re a good fit for your projects!

And just as a reminder, all this year I’ll be posting Patreon-exclusive guides on writing horror. March’s topic is all about character creation. So be sure to come subscribe if that’s something you’re interested in!

Also, if you have news to submit - like new releases you want me to highlight or anything else - please drop me a line and tell me about it so I can add it to upcoming roundups :) I’m always eager to support fellow small-timers and indies in this competitive world.

This month’s book club theme is “a genre you don’t normally read.” For me, that means romance. I trekked to the library to choose a broad selection of romances of different types — contemporary, historical, paranormal — and I’m doing my best to give them a fair shake. It’s not that I look down on romance as a genre (I’m actually quite in awe of how business savvy romance authors are!) but it’s never really appealed to me as a reader. We’ll see how my stack goes, though!

For February, I read Black authors:

• The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas — quite good, emotionally difficult to get through but deeply necessary; should be required reading, even if it’s sometimes baldly didactic (sometimes that’s necessary).

• Mr. Loverman by Bernardine Evaristo - a compelling family saga about a closeted gay man finally coming to terms with his identity in his 70s.

• Binti by Nnedi Okorafor - a short, intriguing little story that could have had a lot more meat to it. But I’m willing to find more of Okorafor’s work to enjoy.

• Gingerbread by Helen Oyeyemi - fascinating, charming, and totally baffling in turns. I had a hard time getting through it because I couldn’t follow the story around all its bends, but the prose was exquisite.

What are you reading in March? What’s a genre you don’t normally read? Sound off in the comments.

Heads up that this month’s blog topic deals with the subject of incest as it relates to fiction. If that’s a tough topic for you and you need to bounce, no hard feelings — I’ll catch you next month!

Gothic fiction has something of a modern reputation as a more high-brow, respectable type of horror. What people miss is that, despite the lush settings and well-bred genteel characters, Gothics are chock full of depravity. Taken in the context of their time, stripped of their flowery language and delivered bare-faced to a modern reader, they have significantly more in common with the contemporary extreme horror genre than you might think.

Don’t let the drafty castles and ghosts fool you. Gothic horror is built on a foundation of violence, rape, incest, and any other shock-inducing transgression you can imagine.

Some less-genre-savvy viewers of Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak were shocked and dismayed by the incestuous relationship at the story’s heart. But that film is a love letter to the Gothic, played straight and without ironic postmodern inversion — and incest is so inherent to the genre that it’s practically a requirement.

So what’s the deal? Why were the books of the late 1700s — and those inspired by them over the ensuing centuries — so obsessed with taboo familial relations?

The Morbid Fascination with the Taboo

Let’s get the obvious point out of the way first: Incest, like cannibalism, is a universal taboo. Different cultures draw the line in different places, and it’s been crossed historically in various ways and contexts, but by and large most places frown upon sexual relations between blood relatives or people with family-like bonds.

From a practical standpoint, it makes some sense. There’s the inbreeding issue, of course, where a lack of genetic diversity can create all sorts of birth defects and issues. But a bigger issue is one of power dynamics. Some family roles (like parent) come with baked-in authority that makes it impossible to establish a relationship between equals — even if you’re talking about adults, the power dynamic at play means that participants may not be able to meaningfully consent because they feel they can’t say no. And even if everyone involved were socially equal, there’s an inherent awkwardness (at best) to engaging in a relationship with someone you will be unable to avoid if you break up. It’s impossible to make a clean break from a close relative (at least without damaging other family relationships) which, again, makes meaningful consent a lot harder to come by.

There are other explanations as well, like the kinship theory proposed by anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, but I’ll leave you to journey down that rabbit hole on your own. My point here is that incest is a taboo, salacious in nature, which on its own makes it compelling fodder for a fictional page-turner. We are, after all, obsessed with what repulses us, and there can be a thrill of pleasure in reading something you’re not supposed to.

But is that all there is to it? Are these Gothics comprised purely of cheap thrills, or is there something else to it?

A Brief and Incomplete Accounting of Incest in Gothics

Incest as a plot device is older than the Gothic. It shows up in ancient works, like the Greek tragedy of Oedipus, and in the Bible, where Lot fathers sons by his daughters in the book of Genesis. It can be found in folklore, too, like the 1600s French fairytale Donkeyskin where a princess flees her father’s advances (this story gets a wonderful retelling by Robin McKinley in her book Deerskin, highly recommend).

But incest has been a fixture of the Gothic since the genre was born -- Horace Walpole's 1764 book The Castle of Otranto, generally agreed upon as the first true Gothic. After the death of his son, an heir-hungry prince makes unwelcome advances on his would-be daughter-in-law.

Walpole wasn't done with incest, though. In 1768, he penned a play titled The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy, in which a mother plays the sexual aggressor to her adult son. Curiously enough, this play was met with so much disgust and horror that it was never performed in his lifetime and became kind of an underground cult text, passed around and whispered about but otherwise allowed to fall into obscurity.

Another seminal early Gothic work is Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), where a monk breaks bad in every way imaginable: succumbing to sexual temptation, witchcraft, torture, and so forth before the icing-on-the-cake reveal that his rape victim is also his sister! He's so morally corrupt that the Devil himself shows up to pass judgment and declare him too gross even for Hell.

Or consider Eliza Parsons' 1793 novel The Castle of Wolfenbach, which involves an unhappy orphan who flees from an incestuous uncle only to stumble into a different set of horrifying family secrets.

Ann Radcliffe became the best-paid author of the 1790s after publishing multiple books featuring incestuous (and often murderous) uncles with designs on their nieces for wealth and status. The best-known of these include The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1796).

By 1904, the Marquis de Sade would be inspired by Lewis and Radcliffe, though he explicitly rejected the more fantastical elements of Gothic fiction, so his work like 120 Days of Sodom lives in the periphery of this discussion. Still, I'd be remiss not to mention it here.

Edgar Allan Poe's story 1839 The Fall of the House of Usher hinges upon a brother-sister incest. (Never mind his own marriage to his first cousin -- that's a different matter).

More modern Gothics also employ incestuous themes. The most obvious of these is V.C. Andrews’ 1979 Flowers in the Attic and its sequels, which feature young siblings who develop a sexual relationship as a consequence of being locked in isolation. There’s also Tanith Lee’s Dark Dance (1992) and its sequels, which introduce a rather peculiar family (to say the least). Incest is a frequent theme in Cormac McCarthy’s work, it shows up in William Faulkner, it even makes an appearance in Melville.

So, I ask again: What’s the deal?

If it exists only to shock and titillate, surely it would not have such an enduring presence across centuries (and among otherwise well-respected literary titans), right? There’s more to it than pure disgust-inducing depravity.

Recontextualizing Patriarchy

Jenny Diplacidi is an author and academic who’s spent a lot of time studying incest in Gothic literature. Her 2018 book Gothic incest: Gender, sexuality and transgression is the most complete and authoritative scholarly text on the subject. In it, she makes a case that Gothic fiction employs incest in multiple ways for multiple purposes — but that at their heart, they’re all tied back to challenging the patriarchy.

Consider the father-daughter incest. The father, as king of the family, has a right to do what he will with his property — including his daughters. Yet, by aligning this type of power with villainous traits like violence, manipulation, and incestuous desire, it reframes that patriarchal right as something debased.

Patriarchy is at the root of those uncle-niece stories, too. Diplacidi writes:

I argue that because of their frequent positioning as the younger brother, Gothic uncles often inhabit a similar position to the heroines in terms of inheritance and identity, being unable to lay legal claim to familial property or title.

Younger brothers, unable to claim land or titles legally, resort to villainous measures to usurp the wealth and power they feel owed, displacing their brothers. It’s like The Lion King, if you start thinking too hard about just what Scar was doing with all of those lionesses (and who their father must have been).

So what about siblings?

Diplacidi has this to say:

It is, I argue, the potential for equality – akin to what Caroline Rooney calls ‘a feeling of universal sympathy associated with the sister’ – that underpins the relationships between brothers and sisters and makes the bonds between siblings so dangerous and potentially destructive to patriarchal society.

In other words, she’s arguing that brother-sister incest, by its nature, puts the siblings at an equal station, which in turn challenges the notion that the man is superior to his wife.

I think Diplacidi’s analysis is fascinating, and I overall agree with a lot of her ideas. I also think that, from a writing perspective, incest is an interesting shorthand for dramatizing all sorts of family dysfunction. Incest signals that, hey — something has gone very wrong.

The Perversion of Propriety

The family is a microcosm of society. The home is a scale replica of the world. In an orderly home, you have a family hierarchy, with every person filling their role and contributing toward the common good.

But what happens if that gets twisted?

What if people refuse to play their part correctly? Reject their role, or abuse their power? What if their very existence proves that the entire system is broken and held together only by the appearance of propriety?

I’ve written in the past that the Gothic genre hinges upon opulence and decay. To be a proper Gothic, you need something that was once grand and beautiful, but now is crumbling from neglect, weakened by insidious rot. You need a family who appear well-off but struggle under the weight of their forbidden secrets.

That’s at the heart of Poe’s House of Usher, right? Here is a family creeping along, clinging to the last of its family fortune, clutching at its wealth through generations of intermarriage until the family has dwindled down to two sickly members living in a house cracked to its very foundation. Both the physical house and the family name collapse at the end, at last unable to sustain the damage.

The gig is up, in other words. The old world, if it was ever good to begin with, certainly isn’t anymore. The secrets you bury will come back to haunt you.

The point of the Gothic — especially in modern times — is to look at something that seems good and solid and traditional, and to scratch its fake-gold-leaf veneer to uncover the disgusting tarnish beneath.

You don’t need incest as the vehicle to drive home that message…but it certainly doesn’t hurt.