Weirding the Gothic: Literary Horror Collisions

The relationship between Gothic and Weird literature is the subject of my doctoral dissertation in-progress, and it informs every fiction book I’ve written. Early Weird tales often resemble the Gothic tradition, featuring phantasmal presences and decaying spaces as metaphors for psychological distress (see, for example, the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Blackwood, and Robert W. Chambers). However, Weird fiction transforms over time into something that exceeds human concerns and even human cognition, reckoning instead with the numinous and the cosmic (see H. P. Lovecraft and his army of heirs, from Stephen King and Thomas Ligotti to Craig Laurance Gidney and Nour Abi-Nakhoul). In my own fiction, I pay homage to both the Gothic and Weird literary traditions, drawing on their overlaps and distinctions to express my own anxieties and preoccupations. For this list, I selected fifteen books that lurk in the foggy woods where the unknowable Weird extends a tentacle to reach the Gothic’s skeletal hand.