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.
