Jim Baen's Universe

Notes From the Buffer Zone

Columns

Gothic Transformation

Written by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The gothic novel has gone through an amazing transformation. And just by writing that sentence, I’ve confused half my audience. Most of you have never heard of a gothic novel.

In the 1970s, gothic novels littered the bookstore shelves. The books were thin—maybe 50-60,000 words—and they followed a formula. A beautiful woman would go to/get invited to/move into an old Victorian house in a remote place. The house would be haunted or possessed by the Devil. The man of the house, generally the owner of the house, might or might not be the cause of the haunting. He might or might not be possessed by the Devil. Or he might or might not be the Devil himself.

Despite his rather sinister appearance, the man would be very appealing. Sexy and strong, but morally ambiguous. The beautiful woman would fall in love with him anyway, and in the end, he would turn out to be the hero. He was secretive, dark, and brooding because he had to be to protect her.

Sound familiar? Half the vampire novels on the shelf these days follow this formula. Twilight is a modified version for young adults. But no one would dare call the modern novels gothics.

In fact, no one would call them horror novels. They are either paranormal romances or urban fantasies, depending upon the endings. (If the ending is happily ever after, then it’s a romance. If the ending is in any way ambiguous {or if the heroine has sex with more than one man/undead creature}, then it’s an urban fantasy.)

Gone are the Victorian mansion covers with the beautiful woman in her nightgown, fleeing the house. Instead, the covers have beautiful women dressed in leather or tight miniskirts, holding a stake or a knife (or, in my favorite case, a guitar). These women don’t need the brooding man (vampire) to save them. The women are perfectly capable of saving themselves.

In fact, it’s the very strength of these women that allows them to fall in love with a non-traditional and possibly dangerous man. Even though he is a threat to humans, he is not a threat to her, usually because he loves her. Or he has a good heart. Or both.

The reasons don’t matter for the purposes of this column. What does matter is the change in label.

The gothic boom went bust in the late 1970s. By the mid-1980s, only Victoria Holt and Phyllis A. Whitney continued to write novels in a blatantly gothic tradition. The gothic novel, with its brooding hero and its somewhat confused (but beautiful) heroine, vanished from store shelves.

Writers who made an excellent living selling gothics suddenly couldn’t sell books. Readers who loved the form had to reread the books on their shelves. Other readers, like me, who had once loved the gothic, grew tired of the endless repetition of the pattern: naïve heroine, scary house, frighteningly masculine male, crisis, reconciliation, happily ever after.

Many of the gothic readers graduated from understated novels about frightened women to overstated novels about terror. As the gothic died, the horror boom began. Now the beautiful woman who fell in love with the brooding man (vampire/ghost/creature) died. Anyone who approached a Victorian mansion in high heels had “death wish” written across her forehead.

Slasher novels replaced the gothic. Overt horror replaced understated unease. The Victoria Holt clones gave way to the Stephen King clones.

For those readers who didn’t want blood and guts or thrills and chills, another genre grew: the historical romance. In the historical romance, it was all right to have a brooding, macho, unrepentantly male hero because (hello!) history hadn’t enlightened him yet. The heroines could be innocent and naïve because (hello!) history hadn’t empowered her yet.

The gothic readers found either their horror fix or their alpha male fix, depending on the genre they fled to when their genre collapsed.

Both horror and the historical romance novel had their heyday from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. By then, the horror novel had died as an ugly a death as the gothic novel. The historical romance hung in, but much transformed.

Now the brooding unrepentantly male hero was passé. Somehow our plucky heroine (so misunderstood in her historical time period, be it Regency England or Medieval Europe) found the only enlightened male lurking in the past. Essentially, history went out the window, and historical romances became costume dramas filled with modern characters.

Not surprisingly, the number of historical romance readers declined,

So what was the poor gothic reader to do? By now, she no longer identified herself as a reader of gothics. The genre was so long dead that most people didn’t remember it or spoke of it with distaste.

Now she simply called herself a romance reader or a horror reader or both. But with the historical romances dying and the horror market gone, she had to turn elsewhere.

Elsewhere was hard to find.

Except for a few writers, struggling to survive in a hostile publishing industry. Writers like Laurell K. Hamilton and Charlaine Harris wrote about non-traditional vampires. Laurell’s novels revealed in the brooding dangerous males, but she added her own twist, the strong female lead. Charlaine Harris’s vampires weren’t love interests, but they weren’t Bram Stoker either. And her books were funny, with a southern gothic charm.

Readers, trying to find their fix, found Laurell or Charlaine or the one or two other writers doing something similar, and told their friends. The readership grew. By the late 1990s, publishers were actively looking for what my agent at the time called “vampire porn.”

What they found, instead, was a whole slew of writers who had grown up reading horror novels, historical romances, and fantastic fiction. Those writers wrote about dark, brooding, dangerous males attracted to equally dangerous females. Some of the influence came from Joss Whedon’s phenomenally successful series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy added a twist to the gothic, horror, romantic paradigm—a wry, sarcastic voice that covered the fear which haunted our main character.

Writers who could capture that voice, add a dangerous male or undead creature, and set everything in a familiar yet possibly magical milieu (the American South seems to be a favorite), suddenly had two new markets.

The first, for the romantics, still had happily ever after endings. Those books, the paranormal romance, somehow convinced us that a werewolf and a human woman could find true love (except for a few days out of the month when {I assume} they were both indisposed).

The second, for the more supernaturally inclined, were the urban fantasies. These novels were often series books in which our heroine faces a hostile world filled with dangerous men/undead creatures. She conquers them and makes inroads into that hostile world, but she continually comes across obstacles and those obstacles lead to new books, new loves, and new challenges.

The gothic for a brand new century.

“How is that a gothic?” you ask. “It lacks the naïve heroine, the Victorian mansion, the understated unease.” Yes. In the 21^st century, women aren’t that naïve (unless they’ve been living on a deserted island somewhere, without television or internet connection). Victorian homes no longer look like mansions—too small, too cramped—and besides, someone has placed a housing development on the twisted mountain road leading to the so-called mansion.

As for the understated unease, well, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, and Buffy herself have changed modern tastes. Understated unease seems slow, as if nothing is happening at all. (And often, if you go back to those gothics, nothing was happening; it was all in the poor naïve heroine’s imagination.)

What the gothic novel, the paranormal romance, and the urban fantasy have in common is the female protagonist, the strong brooding male hero as possible villain, and a sense of discomfort about the world itself.

For in a gothic novel, the Victorian mansion is the heroine’s whole world. In the modern equivalent, the world is either New Orleans or Atlanta or New York (and sometimes it is the entire world). But in the case of the gothic and the modern novel, the world is a scary place, filled with things that are inexplicable and impossible to understand.

The heroine always faces these inexplicable and often frightening things with pluck and aplomb, developing relationships along the way, and sometimes finding true love. She conquers her little corner of the world, and in doing so, it becomes easier to understand.

Seems so simple that anyone can write it. Right?

For a while, anyone will write it. As the market for these books grows, publishers will have to fill their publishing slots with writers who are “like” Laurell K. Hamilton or “writing in the tradition of” Charlaine Harris. Eventually, the market will get saturated with mediocre copies of the books that started the genre(s), and readers, unable to be certain of the quality of the book just by its genre, will go elsewhere.

Of course, they’ll continue to read their favorite writers like Laurell and Charlaine, but the new writers won’t sell at the same numbers. The paranormal romance/urban fantasy market will decline and something else will take its place.

Something that has a dark, brooding, dangerous man who might be the hero or might be the villain, and a beautiful woman who isn’t quite sure what she’s stumbled into. Something supernatural will happen, and the voice innovation (thank you Joss) will remain. But the settings will leave New York/New Orleans/Atlanta just like they left Regency England and looming Victorian mansions—and a whole new genre will be born.

Fifteen to twenty years from now, we’ll be having a similar conversation. Only then, it will begin with the sentence: The paranormal romance has gone through an amazing transformation. We’ll be able to trace the paranormal back to its roots in the late 20^th century and see what it’s become. It won’t be anything we can imagine now, even though the seeds will already have been sown.

For example, the strong heroine who exists in the paranormals has her roots in the women’s movement of the late 1960s or early 1970s. Back then, women who admitted to reading gothic novels had betrayed the sisterhood. Supposedly those books had the social values of an earlier time.

Never mind that most of us who called ourselves feminists also read romance novels. We just never admitted it to each other.

Now it’s okay to read romance novels, paranormal romances, and urban fantasies, partly because the women are as strong as the men. (And partly because we’ve become more accepting of each other’s tastes. We now know that just because a woman reads a novel with a passive heroine, that doesn’t mean the woman wants to be a passive heroine. It might mean that the novel tells a damn fine story.)

The heroines of today’s novels were born during the women’s rights movement. But that same movement made alpha males undesirable. Men who order women about are stuck in the past. Men who don’t admit their feelings are out of touch and possibly emotionally unwell.

Yet that old model—the strong man—still captures our imagination. So we find ways to justify him. First through the historical romance and now through the fact that in many novels, he’s not human at all. (I have to admit, I find that aspect of paranormal romances hilarious.)

Guaranteed this boom will bust, and something will rise out of its ashes. And if you are savvy enough to predict what that something is, hang onto your manuscript for a few years, wait until the bust, and then market it.

Otherwise, do what the rest of us do—go along for the ride. Genres will come and go. But the basic tropes will remain.

The key is figuring out how they’ve disguised themselves this time.

****