Skip to main content

American Neo-Gothic

Two of America’s earliest authors were Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe.  They established the first stages of what would become the American prose tradition, and both can be classified, in some ways, as originators of the Neo-Gothic.

Irving was a bit older than Poe.  Although his personal life had its share of ups and downs, he made his literary fame with his satirical retelling of the history of New York.  He became an overnight sensation.  Some thought him the funniest writer ever.

Running out of money while living in England, he began publishing his series of “Sketches” or short stories.  Among them his most famous works, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”  The latter, according to some, established the spooky autumnal scene as the perfect venue for the scary story.

Irving met John Allan while in London.  Edgar was traveling with his step-father there, but may have been too young at the time to know that he’d met his forebear in the moody tradition of Gothic short stories set in an American context.

There would be others, of course.  The market, however, has become an increasingly difficult one in which to catch a toe-hold.  Few literary magazines publish such Gothic tales anymore.  Some want too much splatter and gore, while others shy away from the truly macabre.

The Neo-Gothic, however, is the American tradition.  The movies with the longest lines are the horror films.  And they need not be horrid to be effective.  I awake early, in the Gothic hours of the day, to do my writing.  I don’t want to splatter my characters across the page.  I want to imply something that the reader can imagine far more effectively.


Perhaps more like Irving than Poe, I also like to inject a sense of humor (although it is there in Poe too), lest we take ourselves too seriously.  Perhaps my execution isn’t good enough, but perchance I’d been born a century-and-a-half before I was, I might have had a chance to share my bizarre visions with the world in print.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Maybe Okay

  A couple pieces of encouraging news, perhaps, dear struggling writers.   I had a couple short stories accepted for publication in recent weeks.   As a fellow writer recently said, “You've got to keep trying.  Somebody will like what you wrote.” That’s a bit of sunshine.   And it’s likely true.   But the stories:   “The Crossing,” about two men in a boat trying to cross the Atlantic, was accepted by JayHenge Publishing.   JayHenge is a small, but paying publisher.   I was flattered when they wanted it for their Masque & Maelström: The Reluctant Exhumation of Edgar Allan Poe anthology.   Being associated with Poe in any way feels good. The second story, “St. Spiders’ Day,” had been brewing in my mind for years—yes, this is a long game!   A friend pointed me to The Creepy podcast.   Since the story hadn’t been written, I followed their guidelines of what they wanted.   It worked. I recently heard a successful wri...

Working Through It

  The thing about being a working writer is you don’t have time.   Between working nine-to-five and trying to eat and sleep, and write, of course, the week is shot.   Weekends are spent doing the errands that you can’t do during the week. I should probably have known better than to join a local writers’ group.   Their meetings, although only once a month, are all-day affairs on a Saturday.   I generally don’t have all day Saturday to spare.   I work all week and I need groceries and the occasional Target run.   And I haven’t yet learned to go a week without eating. This is actually the third writers’ group I’ve joined.   One was not too far from home, but not terribly helpful.   They met on Saturdays, but in the morning only.   Nobody seemed interested in what I was writing, so I stopped going. The second one was about an hour away.   They also met on Saturdays.   Their big thing was having lunch together after the meeting. ...

Creative Righting

  Rejection of my writing is a rejection of my imaginative world.   That’s why I was cheered by the acceptance of one of my stories this week.   That makes number 31. I’ve been working on a lot of fiction lately, even as nonfiction book number 6 is going to press.   The ideas are still there, and bizarre as ever, but publishing venues just aren’t welcoming. The other day I had lunch with a professor whose wife is also a professor.   She just had her first novel published, and so he pointed me to her indie publisher.   I went to their website to learn that they’re closed to submissions.   I have to admit that my latest accepted story, “Creative Writing Club,” was probably given the green light because I know the editor.   That seems like a pretty dicey way to get any notice, doesn’t it?   You have to know the right people even in the low circulation world. My fiction is difficult to classify.   It’s got speculative elements to it.   ...