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.
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