The Contemporary Gothic, Catherine Spooner
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The Contemporary Gothic, Catherine Spooner

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Frankenstein by James Whale (1931) The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli (1781)
from @katehawleycostume on ig. "The creature’s bride."
Ann Demeulemeester Silver Claw Ring
— Mary Shelley, from Frankenstein

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Alfred Rudolfovich Eberling (1872–1951) - “Tamara and Demon”, c. 1910
illustration for Mikhail Lermontov's poem 'The Demon'
Daguerreotype portrait of Winona Ryder from Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)
Do you have a goodreads account?
I used to! But I always forgot to update it so I ended up deleting it.
“Evil seldom takes shape immediately. It is often little more than a whisper at first. A glance. A betrayal. But then it grows and takes root, still invisible, unnoticed. Only fairy tales give evil a proper shape. The big bad wolves, the evil kings, the demons, and devils…”
— Guillermo Del Toro and Cornelia Funke, Pan’s Labyrinth: The Labyrinth of the Faun (2019)
“A tragedy is the story of a human growing into his death mask. What has been done is too total to be undone, or even regretted; it defines the doer once and for all and renders the future impossible. (Macbeth is the story of Macbeth growing into his regicide, even as his wife collapses under it; the hesitant hen-pecked man of the first act becomes a monstrous king with burning eyes, master of the deed that mastered him.) The tragic hero attains something like divine completeness, except that for human beings completeness is death. So the ubiquitous counsel of the chorus concerning the hero—look what fortune has done here, she used to be on top of the world, don’t count on happiness, don’t believe anyone happy until he is dead—says more than it seems to. In the last analysis, what can one say of mere mortals? A human is just too partial, too speckled and subject and already-half-gone, for anything to be really true or false of him. Is he happy, is she sad? Maybe, a bit, for a time, but really—who can say, who can even care? That’s how it is for humans, unless and until they are tragic. The tragic hero is complete. You can call him unhappy (miserable, utterly broken) even before he is dead. For an instant he is something like divine. And then he dies, because there’s nothing left to do. The center of every tragedy is the image of a human being who has already died but keeps talking, someone whose face is a mask. Antigone says this explicitly—she is already dead; Oedipus acts it out in gouging out his eyes.”
— Michael Kinnucan, “The Gods Show Up” (via smakkabagms)

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The Dress Lamp Tree, Tim Walker (2002) / The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook (2016)
the hungers of hadewijch and eckhart, donald f. duclow // stigmata: escaping texts, hélène cixous // you are in a hotel room, joan tierney // the notebooks of malte laurids brigge, rainer maria rilke // great expectations, kathy acker // hot-hand fallacy, jasmine gibson // erotism: death and sensuality, georges bataille // cain, josé saramago // love in the time of monsters, emily palermo // a curious night for a double eclipse, j. karl bogartte.
Bits of botanical horror
During the new moon, the well gives us blood. It’s the only thing the roots in Grandmother’s garden will eat anymore. It clots in the irrigators, even at full spray. I used to only have to clean them every week or two, now I do it daily.
- Grandmother’s Garden, Kitty Horrorshow
But as the arms tightened, there was the sound of sharp splintering and the birch into which the axe had bitten toppled. It struck the ground directly behind the wrestling men. Its branches seemed to reach out and clutch at the feet of Polleau’s son. (…) –and over its tumult he heard the roar of the great forest:
“Kill! Kill!”
- The Women of The Wood, Abraham Merritt
He was lying, face upward, at the foot of the strange orchid. The tentacle-like aerial rootlets no longer swayed freely in the air, but were crowded together, a tangle of grey ropes, and stretched tight, with their ends closely applied to his chin and neck and hands. She did not understand. Then, she saw from one of the exultant tentacles upon his cheek there trickled a little thread of blood.
- The Flowering of the Strange Orchid, H.G. Wells
The wolf told the woodcutter how the Wood hated him, for slashing and mangling its branches, day after day, year after year, cutting, chopping, and hacking at the flesh of the trees with his axe. And so as punishment, the Wood had taken his daughter.
- Unwell, a Midwestern Gothic Mystery, Jim McDoniel, Jessica Best, Jessica Wright Buha & Bilal Dardai
So, with grim determination and with the skill that years of experiment have given me, I grafted a stem of this carnivorous plant to my upper left arm. (…)The original flower resembled a lily somewhat, so I was not surprised at the new lily that finally materialized. But I did wince when I discovered that the opening of the lily was a perfect replica of a boneless human mouth.
- The Moaning Lily, Emma Vane
She was out in the garden when I found her. Out in the rose garden, in her long nightgown. Lying on her stomach. I thought she was dead. She looked dead. Her lips were blue. I touched her hand, it was cold. There were rose-vines growing over her ankles. In loops, thick, covered in thorns. Her ankles were bleeding down onto the ground.
- Mabel, Becca De La Rosa & Mabel Martin
Alexander McQueen S/S96 ‘Spine’ Corset via @dampmagazines
Two fears dominate this Gothic world, the fear of terrible separateness and the fear of unity with some terrible Other. They are embodied in two classic formulas of the ghost story: the heroine’s terrifying discovery that she is all alone and her subsequent discovery that -horror of horrors! - she is not alone.
Perils of the Night: A Feminist Study of Nineteenth-Century Gothic; Eugenia C. Delamotte

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start here, caitlyn siehl // untitled, fortesa latifi // rien ne va plus, margarita karapanau (trans. karen emmerich) // black iris, leah raeder // the thorn merchant, yusuf komunyakaa // monster movie, nicola maye goldberg // a key to common lethal fungi, marge piercy // give me a god i can relate to, blythe baird // crimson peak, dir. guillermo del torro (2014) // the house of hades, rick riordan.
Simone Weil, tr. by Richard Rees, First and Last Notebooks