Gothic: An Illustrated History, by Roger Luckhurst (Princeton University Press, 2021)
At the climax of Viy, the intensely Gothic 1967 film adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s original short tale, the hapless seminarian Khoma is assaulted by a phantasmagoria of ghouls and goblins. Grasping hands burst from the walls, sinister, bat-faced demons creep out of the shadows, skeletons clatter their bones and chatter their teeth. Eventually, goaded by the witch who summoned them and empowered by the great demon Viy himself, the cavorting cavalcade break through the magic circle that surrounds Khoma and beat him to the floor. The last we see of the young man is as a motionless figure lain spread-eagled on the floor, dazed if not dead and his hair whitened by terror. It is a dizzying, joyful and unsettling piece of cinema that leaves the unwitting viewer in a similar state.
It is not unlike the experience of reading Roger Luckhurst’s Gothic: An Illustrated History.
In this lavish, large-format book – the deliciousness of its textured and embossed cover cannot be understated – Roger Luckhurst attempts to document “the weaving path of the Gothic from the shadows of history to the very heart of popular culture today,” a more difficult endeavour than that simple sentence might lead you to believe. Even Luckhurst acknowledges this in the book’s opening line, admitting that it “used to be easy to define the Gothic” due to its largely Northern European origins, but the genre “now speaks in many languages” and some critics “complain that the term ‘Gothic’ is now so ubiquitous that its original meaning has been entirely hollowed out.” For Luckhurst, though, this hollowing isn’t a bug but a feature; the inherent hollowness of the Gothic means that it can always be filled with new hopes and dreams, new fears and horrors from every country and culture of the world.
Which is all well and good but how does all that fit into a book? Rapidly, appears to be the answer.
Gothic is cleverly constructed from four main sections, composed themselves of five essays each. These essays outline the Gothic’s traits and what Luckhurst refers to as “travelling tropes” by tackling them with a kind of broad-ranging specificity; in the essay “Labyrinth,” part of the opening Architecture & Form section, Luckhurst combines the more traditional labyrinths of both Knossos and Chartres Cathedral with those of DOOM and Pac-Man, while The Gothic Compass’s “East” looks at the “beyond the woods” homelands of classic Gothic monsters like Dracula before examining the genre’s own monstrosity when confronted with its problematic grounding in othering, Orientalism and outright racism. This does mean that no individual text is dwelled upon for very long – flicking through the book’s many images shows the title screen for the video game Alone in The Dark juxtaposed against Victorian séance photography, while a still from the film adaptation of The Color Out of Space faces German political cartoons – but, somehow, the whole never feels jumbled. In fact, by plucking his sources from so wide an array and presenting them so densely, Luckhurst shows quite forcefully that the Gothic is not simply one amongst many aesthetic choices that can be sprinkled on top of human culture but is actually part of its deep and foundational bedrock – our own collective psyche. The fear of being lost in a maze, of being killed by a monster, of being replaced by a duplicate or, perhaps more subtly, of being infected by some abject, formless thing – whether genetic or memetic – is a fear that cuts directly to what it is to be human. Equally, perhaps perversely, we have an intense fascination with those fears, those scabs we can’t help picking at. Gothic shows, succinctly, how this contradictory obsession with the beautiful-horrible lies at the heart of some of our best and worst characteristics.
If there’s any criticism to offer, ironically, it’s one of omission. China’s contribution, unlike that of Japan, is largely considered in terms of how it’s been used by Western colonialism, although that does admittedly serve to make a powerful point about the Gothic’s ambiguous morality. The lack of any real investigation beyond Egypt into the wider continent of Africa does feel like a more unfortunate omission, however. Not even the rich and deeply Gothic mix of music, art and film that is Afrofuturism gets a mention even as it feels like a perfect, powerful way to show how the Gothic can be used in the fight against cultural colonialism.
Even allowing for these few gaps, Gothic may be too much for some readers. Approached as a coffee table art-book, it’s a dense and sometimes over-whelming reading experience; it is an experience, however, that, with some perseverance, opens a gateway to a cornucopia of other media to explore. It may even prove to be too little for others, especially those readers looking for a more orthodox history of the Gothic as an artistic tradition. I absolutely loved every image- and idea-laden page, though. I loved scampering gleefully from Dante’s Inferno to Alien to Japanese yokai to Phase IV to the performance art of Leigh Bowery. I loved the obvious, cackling delight that Luckhurst indulged in while writing the book. I loved its slightly wild-eyed approach and I loved being pulled along in its delirious wake.
I loved realizing, while reading Gothic, that I am, far from being the well-intentioned if ineffectual Khoma standing against the forces of darkness, actually one of Viy’s bat-faced demons, shrieking their derision at the fusty forces of Order.
Which is not something your average book can say.
You can order Roger Luckhurst’s Gothic from Princeton University Press’s website or from Amazon (ad):
Review by: Daniel Pietersen, who is the editor of I Am Stone: The Gothic Weird Tales Of R Murray Gilchrist, part of the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, and also a regular guest lecturer for the Romancing The Gothic project. He covers gothic and weird horror, both fiction and non-fiction, for publications like Dead Reckonings, Revenant and Horrified. Daniel lives in Edinburgh with his wife, dog and a surprising amount of skulls. He has previously reviewed The Villa and the Vortex by Elinor Mordaunt for Horror Homeroom.
