I enjoy reading gothic romances but favor those set in Europe, with castles and all the trimmings. I can't find any good ones that take place in America. Can anyone recommend a good American gothic?

fallover Wrote:I enjoy reading gothic romances but favor those set in Europe, with castles and all the trimmings.  I can't find any good ones that take place in America.  Can anyone recommend a good American gothic?

Well, I don't know if it can be described as a gothic romance, but it has certain elements of it. I enjoyed reading Rae Foley's Girl on a High Wire

paigenumber Wrote:

fallover Wrote:I enjoy reading gothic romances but favor those set in Europe, with castles and all the trimmings.  I can't find any good ones that take place in America.  Can anyone recommend a good American gothic?

Well, I don't know if it can be described as a gothic romance, but it has certain elements of it.  I enjoyed reading Rae Foley's Girl on a High Wire

One of my favorites is Barbara Michaels. She is American. Her historical gothics are set in England but her contemporary ones are usually of the horror gothic type and they take place in the US.

VC Andrews is my favorite American gothic novel writer. She mixes gothic romance and family saga, and her most famous work is Flowers is the Attic. Most of her work has been written by a ghost writer finishing up her original works, and her earliest works are definitely her best.

Wow, I never really considered VC Andrews as Gothic. I always regarded her as horror but I guess in a way, that does make it Gothic. I have a whole collection of her books but have not started reading any of them. I did see the movie Flowers in the Attic way back when. Although I can't remember all the details of the movie because I had not read the book, I still recall certain scenes, so the story must have impressed me.

I don't really consider VC Andrews as a horror author, but I guess she can be interpreted as such. I've read every book by both her and her ghost writer, and I'm a really big fan. Her original works are definitely the most gothic of all her novels.

Who was V.C. Andrew's ghost writer? You seem to know a lot about V.C. Andrews. Maybe you can write up a little blurb about her and share it with us. I think it would be nice to have an area where we can share information about some of our favorite authors as well as the history and evolution of Gothic novels. Perhaps we can ask the administrator to add some categories for it. (It's so difficult to get good information about Gothic romances without searching through the entire internet.) What do you think?

fallover Wrote:I enjoy reading gothic romances but favor those set in Europe, with castles and all the trimmings.  I can't find any good ones that take place in America.  Can anyone recommend a good American gothic?

I take it you favor historical Gothics, so I would recommend Sea Jade by Phyllis Whitney, as I did to whitelady. Whitney has written quite a few Gothics, most are contemporary though.

I just discovered this author and added him to my ever-growing "to read" list.

It's a man!!

Charles Brockden Brown is apparently considered by some to be the American answer to Ann Radcliffe, although others disagree vehemently with this observation. Here's some information from Wikipedia and a list of his novels. Sounds good enough to me, but I think we should each define what we ourselves accept as "Gothic.".

...Brown's novels combine several revolutionary-era fiction subgenres with other types of late-Enlightenment scientific and medical knowledges. Most notably, they develop the British radical-democratic models of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Holcroft and combine these with elements of German "Schauer-romantik" gothic from Friedrich Schiller, the enlightened sentimental fictions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Laurence Sterne, women's domestic novels by writers such as Fanny Burney or Hannah Webster Foster, and other genres such as captivity narrative. Brown builds plots around particular motifs such as sleepwalking and religious mania, drawing on Enlightenment medical writings by figures such as Erasmus Darwin.

Of the seven extant novels, the first four to be published in book form (Wieland, Ormond, Edgar Huntly, and Arthur Mervyn) have received the lion's share of commentary and attention. Because of their sensational violence, dramatic intensity, and intellectual complexity, these four novels are often referred to as the "gothic" or "Godwinian" novels. Stephen Calvert, which appeared only in serialized form and in the posthumous 1815 biography, remained little-read until the end of the twentieth century, but is notable as the first US novel to thematize same-sex sexuality. Clara Howard and Jane Talbot have sometimes been regarded as relatively conventional works distinct from the earlier novels because they return to classic epistolary form and focus on domestic issues that, at first glance, seem far-removed from the more violent and sensational world of the first four novels. Recent scholarship (since the 1980s), however, has largely revised this view and emphasizes the continuities and overall coherence of all seven novels understood as a loosely unified ensemble.


The novels, in their order of publication, are:

1. ) Sky-Walk; or, The Man Unknown to Himself (completed by March 1798 and partially typeset, but subsequently lost and never published)
2. ) Wieland; or, the Transformation (September 1798)
3. ) Ormond; or, the Secret Witness (January, 1799)
4. a) Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 (May 1799)
5. ) Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (August 1799)
6. ) Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (serialized from June 1799 to June 1800)
7. b) Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, Second Part (September 1800)
8. ) Clara Howard; In a Series of Letters (June 1801)
9. ) Jane Talbot; A Novel (December 1801)

fallover Wrote:I enjoy reading gothic romances but favor those set in Europe, with castles and all the trimmings. I can't find any good ones that take place in America. Can anyone recommend a good American gothic?

I can recommend Mostly by Moonlight by Dorothy Daniels. It is set in 1870's Maine -- in a castle [wealthy sea captain Jabez Warren built it as a wedding gift for his Scottish bride, Elizabeth; an exact replica of the ancestral Scottish castle she grew up in].

DD sold over 20 million novels in her career.