In Praise of Non-Anglocentric Frankensteins

The World Will Hunt You and Kill You For Who You Are

First off, let’s get this out there: I don’t like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I get it, but I don’t like it. Del Toro talks [positively] about the book’s “fidgetey energy”, like a teenager questioning “why” to so many things, from capitalism to the meaning of life, and I think that’s also what doesn’t work for me, in the same way I can’t get on with the frenetic energy of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (which is basically ADHD: The Novel).

That said, I have two versions of it that I really, genuinely enjoy, and this post will contain spoilers for both: one is Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein (2025), and the other is Çağan Irmak’s Yaratılan/Creature (2023).

This will be a long post. I apologise for nothing.

They are both completely different, and focus on very different aspects of the novel and the themes within it. Neither is completely faithful, but both do really interesting things with the source material.

“I am more attracted to making movies about people that are full of villainy, because ultimately it’s a more real way of seeing the world.” – Guillermo Del Toro (quote from the documentary Frankenstein: The Anatomy Lesson 2025)

I really love both adaptations for the very different things they say and are in conversation with. While Del Toro is making a film focused (among other things) on the nature of villainy and monstrosity, Irmak is making a mini-series about (among other things) the redemptive nature of community and its power to engender and shape Selfhood, and the corrupting effects of isolation upon the soul, body, mind, and spirit.

I love both those things, and I find them both really compelling ways to tell the same story.

[One is also telling it within the confines of 2.5 hours, and the other is an 8-part mini-series, so they also have completely different formats and storytelling frames.]

Check out the trailers to get a feel of them side by side!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WZllcEgWrM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKl1QlR7P4U

Let me share some things I really love, comparing and contrasting the two versions.

CONTENTS

Naming (and Not Naming) the Characters
Framed Narrative Device
Victor/Ziya Comparison
Victor/The Creature vs Ziya/Ihsan
The Women
The Lab Setting
Religious Themes
Isolation & Redemption

What’s In A Name

Del Toro’s Victor & the Creature and Irmak’s Ziya & Ihsan are very different characters. Del Toro wanted to focus on the dialogue between fathers and sons, the isolation of those broken relationships and perpetuating abusive cycles. This is a story of rejection of a child, someone created from death then forced into monstrosity and to discover himself against this perception, because of the maker’s arrogance and hubris. Irmak wanted to tell a story of pushing the boundaries of science for the benefit of his family and community, the pain of losing members of that family and community, and the resurrecting of a parental figure (also rejected in horror) rather than the creation of an unwanted son. The themes are the same, but as it set in Ottoman Turkey, it has a distinctly Islamic cultural flavour, and is more grounded in communal relationships.

Even the names are meaningful: Victor, of course, has the meaning of the noun; the one who is victorious. In the end, he is defeated by his own arrogance and hubris, and broken down by the very victory over death he strived for. A victor is a singular person, often; many can run a race, but only one can win. Victor is a lonely, singular character – out in front of the scientific community, too far ahead to be fully appreciated or endorsed, and also too far gone to hear the words of warning and caution from behind him. Yes, he can achieve what he wants – he can triumph – but at what cost to himself, and others drawn into his orbit?

Del Toro plays with these themes with his Latin interpretation of Victor, whose passion cannot be stifled by cries of obscenity and blasphemy, and who does not understand why people, including his own brother, are frightened of him. Del Toro, I think, plays with the singularity of the victor as an image innate within the name of his protagonist, and the singularity of the monstrum, something strange and singular that gives warning or instruction of evil and the unnatural.

He embraces the original vision of Shelley in having Victor as the real monster, and this is the path he forges for his audience through Victor’s arc, and the explicit acknowledgement of his monstrosity in the dialogue with other characters like William and Elizabeth. Victor is ‘full of villainy’, and Del Toro enjoys playing with this on screen, and leading up to Victor’s suffering and death as his only means of redemption.

Having the Creature constantly repeat Victor’s name is not only to emphasise the bond of father/son between them, but serves as a statement of fact: Victor is indeed the victor, he has won, he has conquered death, and now there are no more horizons for him to chase. The Creature repeats his name as a statement of fact, of not just who Victor is, but what he is, and Victor’s horror and irritability stems not just from the fact that this is all his creation can say, but serves as a constant reminder that, now he has won, he doesn’t like it.

The Creature does not name himself Adam in this adaptation, nor does he receive a name from anyone else; the only word he can initially say is “Victor”, his creator’s name, which he repeats in various emotional states, until Elizabeth teaches him to say “Elizabeth”, also. The soft way the Creature pronounces this name drives Victor into a jealous frenzy and increases his disgust. Yet the Creature at no point confesses or professes romantic love for her – in these early scenes, he repeats the names as a child might say ‘father’ and ‘mother’.

As Del Toro emphasises the Creature’s composite makeup throughout the film, and the question is asked, in which part lies the soul, the question of in which part lies the name is absent. The Creature is a being without a name, on purpose, because he has surpassed the singularity of his creator. It is also a way of showing the audience that names are not necessary – for Victor to name his creation would be an act of conquest, of colonisation, of ownership, but Victor does not do this because he does not want the responsibility that goes with it. He does not want to be associated with the ‘monster’ he has made, because it doesn’t live up to his expectations, his ideals, and he has to reckon with the fact that he is its maker regardless.

To name something also means giving it and others a means to understand itself, and Victor withholds this, perhaps as another form of control. Yet in this, the Creature demonstrates that profound and mutual human connection is possible without names; he never learns the name of the old blind man, and yet his speech takes on the old man’s accent and patterns. They share a connection that does not require names or labels; it simply is, and it is understood through action and mutual respect and understanding. Similarly, the audience is invited into empathetic communion with the Creature through the perspective shift, just as in Shelley’s novel, and they can connect with him through his story, without a need for a name. This absence does not even feel like an absence; it simply is, and ultimately, no name or label needs to be placed on the Creature by others or by himself in order to come to an understanding of his own nature, and his self acceptance. He is known, and that is enough.

In Irmak’s adaptation, names are also important.

Ziya is a unisex Turkish name that means ‘light’, which reflects the character’s desire for enlightenment, fulfils part of a prophecy about the resurrection ritual required to get the machine to work, and also creates a sense of contrast to his inner darkness and character development journey. This signals that the story is not about a victor, a winner, but about a man whose passionate pursuit of knowledge and scientific boundary pushing for the sake of his community as much as for himself, leads him to some dark places.

Ziya begins by confronting three major medical horrors: first, finding out his mother’s friend, whom he has known from childhood, has leprosy. His immediate instinct is to touch her, and he is frustrated by the stigma and ostracisation she is experiencing, and the lack of effective treatment for her condition. Secondly, the pain that Ayise feels at the death of her mother in a contagion, and the fact that he cannot bring her mother back, has a profound effect on him. Thirdly, the horror of a cholera epidemic which takes his mother, and during which he personally works with his father, Dr Muzaffer (with whom he has a loving, if occasionally fiery, relationship) to provide limited medical assistance to the town.

Ziya goes to train in Istanbul, only to find that the academy has narrow views, and does not want students to go beyond the limits of currently understood medicine, which Ziya argues is anti-Islamic. He is thrown out for challenging his tutor, but Ihsan blackmails the principle into letting Ziya resume his studies. It turns out that the professor’s reluctance to allow students to investigate anything stems from his own insecurities at having a forged diploma, rather from any actual religious conservatism, which he hides behind. Ziya sheds light on the academy, but also on Ihsan, whom he first encounters at night. Ihsan is presented at first as the shadow-side of Ziya, but as the series progresses, it is clear it is also the other way around. Ziya tricks Ihsan into working alongside him, and even drugs Ihsan to get to the bottom of his secret machine. When it all goes wrong, it is Ihsan who pays the price, and Ziya resurrects him out of guilt and desperation, but then tries to hide what he has done by burning down the lab. He doesn’t try to burn Ihsan with it, but instead dresses him up as a leprosy sufferer and abandons him on the roadside. But hidden things keep coming to light, whether Ziya wants them to or not, and the consequences of his actions pursue him relentlessly, no matter how he tries to escape them.

Ihsan has a whole wealth of meaning, from simply ‘kindness’, to the deeply Islamic principle of showing your faith in actions, beautifying, or to do beautiful things. Ihsan helps people on the margins of society, and has a conscience about using dead bodies in his experiments – he covers himself from shame, but Ziya is more brazen and less concerned with morality. Ihsan extends to using a dead boar (pigs are haram), and drinks alcohol to excess, but he has lines which Ziya encourages him to cross. The result is his own horrible death, and resurrection, whereafter he is constantly referred to as a ghoul. Even so, he shows kindness and compassion to people he comes across, and seeks to protect other powerless people whom society has rejected, like him. In this way, he still lives up to his name, and ironically more so after his unnatural rebirth than when he was alive.

Ihsan and Ziya’s perversion of the natural order and use of forbidden texts pervert their very names and natures, but the narrative allows for them to return to those meanings, and explore (especially for Ihsan), how one can still enact kind and beautifying deeds as part of his social responsibility, even when he has been rejected by society and does not know how he fits into it anymore.

After a while, he re-names himself Ihsan, once his memory patchily returns, but he no longer knows who Ihsan was, or what that name means to anyone who might have known him. He has to find a new way to be Ihsan, and find a way back into himself, as well as a new way to understand his current existence. This forms Ihsan’s character arc, one rooted in Turkish drama as much as it is in Shelley’s novel. The result is that every episode is a banger, but Irmak manages to avoid a lot of the usual Diziler cliches, while making Frankenstein fit into a Turkish mould to be enjoyed by audiences used to certain formulae and conventions.

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The Framed Narrative: Preface

Del Toro’s story begins in the Arctic, reset to 1857, but focused on a Danish expedition to the North Pole. There wasn’t really a Danish expedition at this time, there was a British one which aimed to find Franklin’s lost expedition, and the opening of Del Toro’s movie definitely gave me The Terror vibes. The framed narrative goes from here, and I really liked the opening being in Danish, rather than English, as that located it for me as a much less Anglocentric Frankenstein and set the tone.

Irmak’s story is prefaced with Captain Ömer’s narration, and he asks why are people so afraid of ghouls? It is because they are afraid the ghoul will start talking, and they will learn there is nothing after death. It is set on the snowy mountains in northwestern Turkey, and the city of Bursa which lies in the foothills. In the mountains is rumoured to be the treasure of a long-dead Byzantine prince, and so the mountains are frequented by treasure hunters who often lose limbs to frostbite. One such party, led by Captain Ömer, discovers an unconscious man in the snow, who seems to have been carried there by a mysterious figure. Thus sets off the framed narrative, initially shot as backstory.

Both these framed narratives have the same function as the book – the tale is told to men obsessed with their own horizons, their own chasing after legends and making something of themselves, and the tales serve as a warning against their overreaching, dangerous ambitions. Except, of course, Victor’s tale is told only to the Captain of the ship, but Ziya’s tale is told at first just to Captain Ömer, but then to the whole group, and is a warning not to one man, but a warning that benefits all the hearers of the same story. Even in this, we have the contrast of the singular and individual versus the community and society.

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Victor & Ziya

Victor is scarred by his mother’s death as a young boy. She dies giving birth to William, his little brother, whose appearance favours their father, and makes him the favourite child. I can see the Latin American racial layers coming into play here, superimposed on the European aristocracy, and I really liked that dimension. I really enjoy the passionate Victor, much more than the cold, aloof, Germanic version who whines and complains a lot.

Ziya, on the other hand, is a grown man training under his father to be a doctor. He was deeply moved as a child by Asiye’s pain after she loses her mother, but his own loss comes when a cholera outbreak takes not only a large number of people in the village, but his own mother, too. Ziya is arrogant and hot-headed, but he has a close and loving (if tempestuous) relationship with his father. It is not the desire to supercede him that drives Ziya, but the determination to overcome death.

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Victor & the Creature / Ziya & Ihsan

Victor’s relationship with the Creature is that of a bad father, procreating without woman, and not understanding either his creation, or how to have a relationship with him once he is made. This is the source of Victor’s horror and disgust – he has made something he doesn’t understand and cannot control, cannot unplug, cannot contain. Victor drinks milk, not alcohol, arrested at the point of his childhood and claiming an innocence he no longer has. He is searching for the secret to life to break the last barrier of science, for his own hubristic ideals, but he has no plans beyond this initial goal, which becomes all-consuming. When he does finally succeed, he immediately chains his creation to continue his control over it. He is encouraged in this endeavour by Harlander, a man riddled with syphilis, wanting to preserve his own mind in the new body of a new man.

Harlander reminded me strongly of both Basil and Henry in The Picture of Dorian Grey, and Del Toro himself described him as both antagonist and sympathetic. Yet he is not a corrupting influence – Victor is doing that all by himself. He also exceeds his own father’s cruelties, and the whole film is very much grounded in that central premise of broken father/son relationships.

Ziya’s relationship with Ihsan is very different – from the first moment they meet in Istanbul, there is a sense of both attraction and repulsion. Ziya is afraid of Ihsan’s strange behaviour at the University, and then Ihsan begins leaving him notes to let him know that he saw him spying. He behaves the way Shelley’s Creature does to Victor at the end of the novel, mirroring this relationship, and foreshadowing what is to come.

The horror here comes from resurrecting Ihsan as a deformed, blank slate – no longer Ihsan as Victor knew him in life, but something else, a ghoul, that cannot communicate in the same ways. When the newly resurrected Ihsan says “baba?” at the marketplace, it reinforces the horror at that relationship being reversed, and now being unfamiliar and fundamentally broken. That is not something that the embittered, lonely cynic with a secret heart of gold would ever say.

Ihsan in life is already Othered – a disgraced ex-faculty member of the medical school, a drunk with aural hallucinations, acting erratically. Ihsan is both Creature and Harlander, the instigator of Ziya’s resurrection discoveries, and the resurrected who pays the price for his own ambitions as much as for Ziya’s.

In fact, Ihsan is in the parental or mentoring role, specifically asked by Ziya’s father to keep an eye on him. They are, from the outset, mirrors of one another, presented explicitly throughout as two parts of one whole, two sides of the same coin, life and death, Self and Other, monster and man. This is not a story about bad fathers and damaged sons, it’s a story about all the facets of a person, and how community is essential in shaping them and guiding them back to a sense of themselves.

Ihsan is already a recluse conducting haram experiments, despite having a kind and caring heart, and persuading himself he is doing questionable things for the right reasons. The lady with leprosy, living in a colony of fellow sufferers, kills herself after learning of Ziya’s mother’s death from Ayise, and reportedly falling into a depression (off-screen). Ayise learns about the degrading and detrimental impact that being cut off from mainstream society with a stigmatised disease can have, while Ihsan’s ostracism has left him lonely, bitter, and falling into heresy. Ziya doesn’t see this – he leans into it, and cuts himself off from the world with Ihsan in order to pursue their dangerous goals.

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The Women

Then there is Elizabeth and Asiye. Again, two very different characters, playing very different roles within the same story. Also bear in mind that Del Toro’s story is a deeply Gothic piece, while Irmak’s pays homage to the European Gothic elements of the story, but is more rooted in Turkish drama traditions.

I loved Mia Goth’s portrayals of both Elizabeth and Clara Frankenstein, I loved the costuming and the colours, the relationships she had with William, Victor, and the Creature. I also appreciated that she wasn’t murdered by the Creature, as she is in the novel, to hurt Victor. Elizabeth Lavenza is the adopted sister and wife of Victor in the novel, following the pseudo-incestuous Gothic trope, but she’s also a mother-figure for him, and that is brought out in Del Toro’s version as sister-in-law with spurned romantic tension, and the fact Mia Goth literally plays Victor’s mother, so the fact that both he and William are subconsciously drawn to Elizabeth adds another pseudo-incestuous dimension by visual associations. I really enjoyed all those layers.

I love that Elizabeth turns Victor down to marry his brother in this version, and that Ayise’s rejection of Ziya prompts the start of his redemption, where he pledges to do better, and give up his obsessions, arrogance, and pretensions, and live a simpler life. At this moment, a plate smashes, an omen that a crisis has been averted. Victor has no such redemptive moment – he ends up shooting Elizabeth and blaming the Creature. His crisis is not averted, but his moment of forgiveness comes on his deathbed. Unlike Ziya, Del Toro’s Victor is not afforded a chance to redeem himself, but only given the opportunity to suffer on the ice as hunter becomes hunted, and creation masters the creator. Elizabeth is not his redemption or his conscience, she’s a character given her own personality and space on screen, and she’s really well played.

It is very deliberate that the only women in this adaptation are Victor’s mother and love interest, and they are played by the same actress. This really reinforces a lot of the character notes and themes of the film, and again, I loved Mia Goth in this so much.

The women in Irmak’s adaptation are many and varied. There is Ziya’s mother and his grandmother, both of whom are great characters, and the neighbour with leprosy, who plays a part in both Ziya’s arc and in Ayise’s. There are the women in the circus where Ihsan finds a temporary family and home. There is Esma and the old lady in the village where Ihsan flees after the circus, and there is Ayise herself, the main female character and Ziya’s bride-to-be.

I could talk about all of them in detail, but I’ll focus on two of them, to match the two female characters in Del Toro’s version. Rather than it being Ayise and Ziya’s mother Gülfem, I will talk about Ayise and Esma.

Ayise is raised with Ziya after her mother dies, and Ayise’s father declares that there is nothing for her in the village, where many others have also died. She and Ziya fall in love, and Ziya’s mother gives them her blessing on her deathbed. I don’t personally believe Del Toro’s Frankenstein should pass the Bechdel test, which is something I’ve seen Internet Discourse about (because it doesn’t), but this adaptation does – Ayise shows herself to be a good-hearted, independent, and community-spirited woman, who continues to comfort and visit a family friend with leprosy, just as Ziya’s mother did. Ayise is the peace-keeper in the home not by capitulating or being quiet, but by shouting at Ziya when he’s wrong and making him apologise to his father when that is warranted. She is not his mother, but his partner, with a life of her own while he is in Istanbul, and I really loved that for her. She has her own lessons to learn about love and suffering, her privilege, and her place in the community and the world, apart from Ziya.

Esma is Ihan’s love interest – it takes him until he resurrects to have one of those, so arguably he only really comes to know a family and experience love after his short sojurn in Hell. Esma is the equivalent of the young girl (Safie) who lives with her blind grandfather in the book, who isn’t given space in Del Toro’s version. In this one, Esma is pregnant – her fiancé raped her, then refused to accept the child was his, and she ran away. She is in hiding with an old lady who took her in, and now Ihsan is offered the life of a father with a wife and child, but this is snatched from him when the baby is born, and Esma is murdered in an honour killing. The baby is given up for adoption, and Ihsan is once more without a family, but he wants Ziya to resurrect Esma for him so she can be his companion and bride. He decides against this at the end, to not condemn her to the life he is living.

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The Lab

In Del Toro’s Frankenstein, the lab itself is an absolutely amazing set piece, with so many visual homages and great details. The colours are in dialogue with the costumes, the lighting works with everything, and it’s genuinely an amazing feat of set design. It’s very much a phallic feat of engineering, the kind of thing a certain type of man builds to compensate for the size of his estate… The storm is the catalyst, but so is the death of Harlander. There is a crucified Creature waiting rebirth, and there is beauty in the monstrous make-up. There is also the implication that the first thing the Creature must do is get himself off his cross (albeit one laid on the floor), and this is the opposite of Christ’s resurrection; even his birth is a blasphemy, and this is Victor’s fault, not his own.

Corpse parts are everywhere. When the Creature is born, Frankenstein’s first instinct is to chain him up and leave him below the lab in the tower, frustrated with the slowness of his intellectual progress. He threatens and abuses the Creature for being afraid, and for only being able to say “Victor”, the way an infant’s first word might be “Dada”.

The lab explodes with amazing pyrotechnics, and we see how Victor escapes first, then the Creature in the Creature’s point of view section of the film.

In Irmak’s version, the lab is within Ihsan’s house, a hidden secret, and this makes everything more contained and dramatic. It is in the woods outside Istanbul; lonely, unassuming, just like Ihsan himself. However – it is Ziya himself who gives life to Ihsan, not just via the machine and galvinism, but because he fulfils the prophetic conditions of the Book of Resurrection and understands it is his own blood, from his palms (on which, his grandmother told him, are engraved the 99 names of Allah), and he is willing to bleed and sacrifice himself to regain Ihsan. He initially took blood from an ethnic minority community in exchange for money, the same ones he defended against racism from a guard, but it is his own blood that is required.

There is no beauty in the horribly burned corpse of Ihsan – and when he rises, he is a blank slate, and bears no resemblance to the man Ziya loved. Ziya begs the resurrected Ihsan to speak to him, to give him some sign that Ihsan is still there, that he remembers who he was before he died. Ziya’s horror and rejection of Ihsan comes from his belief that Ihsan has come back wrong and empty. Ihsan is no longer a Professor, but needs to be toilet-trained and washed like a baby. His fear of fire leads him to nearly strangle Ziya, who chains him to his divan, horrified and not knowing what to do. Ziya recruits his friend Yunus to help him burn the lab down and get Ihsan out, planning to abandon him like an unwanted dog.

In both cases, there is a deep sense of fear and horror and profound disappointment in their creation, but for very different reasons. Frankenstein is appalled that he has begotten someone who cannot match his measure of intelligence, but also lacks the patience to teach him properly. He is horrified at the monster he has made, seeing only the unnaturalness of him, the imperfections; yet he intervenes in the market when Ihsan follows him there, and prevents the people from attacking Ihsan and hurting him. Ziya cannot do more than this, however – he runs away and abandons Ihsan again, and Ihsan stands there, confused and bereft, saying, “Baba?” (“Dad?” in Turkish). This is not the relationship that they ever had, and it’s not something Ihsan would ever say. In fact, he had a bad relationship with his own father, who rejected him, and now he is going through this abandonment again in his afterlife. Ihsan is about to be rejected and ostracised all over again, just as he was in life, but without the tools to deal with it, or the understanding of himself to cope.

Ziya is devastated at the loss of Ihan, but also wants to cover his tracks. He is afraid that Ihsan had been returned from Hell, and this was the reason for his fear of fire, his total amnesia, and his regression. He doesn’t want to be responsible, and so he abandons Ihsan on the road disguised as a leprosy sufferer, selfishly demands forgiveness, then runs away and leaves him there.

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Religious Themes

I really like the religious questions and intertextual elements of (book) Frankenstein, and how this is echoed in Del Toro’s version with questions of the soul, forgiveness, and the final moment of embracing the sun – the moment that appears at the end of Cronos and Pinocchio, a favourite image for Del Toro that encapsulates his ethos. It’s the antithesis of Shelley’s ending, where the Creature walks out into the darkness, and yet it provides that ending, and imagines beyond it, to the sunrise of a new moment, a new beginning, a new man. Not only new, but accepted and seen, wholly and completely, and loved for who he is. This is contrasted with the monstrosity of Victor, condemned for playing God, and in whom a God who rejects and abandons His creations is held up as monstrous. Victor is criticised as being obscene and blasphemous – all of which he turns on his creation, who says, “To you I am obscene – to me, I am simply myself” (paraphrased).

In the book, of course, the ending is not as explicitly hopeful and optimistic, but in the book, the Creature murdered Elizabeth and has become “an instrument of evil”. Walton discovers the Creature mourning Victor. The Creature walks off into darkness to die, trying to reclaim his sense of self in the process. I prefer the adaptations that end on a note of hope, or those which really dive into the tragedy of the human existence and the central relationship.

In Irmak’s version, Ziya uses the teachings of the Prophet (pbuh) and the Qu’ran to justify pushing the boundaries of science, and is spurred to find cures for everything from his experiences in Bursa. His community’s cholera epidemic, seeing Ayise’s pain at her mother’s death, and seeing his mother’s friend with leprosy, all spur him onwards, but the crucial thing is finding a picture book in his father’s study disguised as “Stories for Children”, but actually relating the tale of the “Book of Resurrection”, a forbidden and lost tome. Ziya memorises the book even though his father punishes him for having taken a key and getting it out of its locked hiding place, and here we get some Necronomicon vibes/references, with alchemy. Ihsan, meanwhile, has been desperately seeking this book to push forwards with his own experiments (decidedly not halal, as his machine uses wild boar). Yet Ihsan tries to persuade Ziya and himself he only wants to use the machine to revive diseased and damaged organs, and cure bad diseases, not to raise the dead. It is Ziya who whole-heartedly sets out with the resurrection goal from the start, and shows Ihsan that he is lying to himself. This sets the experiments up as haram, and mirrors book Victor using animal bones and parts from the abbatoir in order to make his Creature, as well as human parts.

Neither Del Toro nor Irmak use the pick ‘n’ mix approach with their Creature, but I think this is Irmak’s reference to it, as well as using this to really underline the obscenities of the experiments for the audience. This is contrasted with Ziya’s enthusiasm – he doesn’t condemn Ihsan, but instead acts as a living version of the forbidden book, as the pictures and captions now exist in his head. It is fitting, then, that Ihsan’s accidental and tragic death makes him the prime subject for the machine, and turns him from Professor to Creature. The questions here centre also on the soul, but from the perspective of folklore and Islamic teaching; what is Ihsan now he is resurrected? Is he a ghoul? Do ghouls have souls? Can they be redeemed like living humans?

The machine in Irmak’s version is described as a sentient thing – mocking Ziya, looking at him. Ziya tells Cpt. Ömer that it was then he felt Shaitan beside him; this is the first time this pursuit has explicitly been aligned with the demonic, and it is by Ziya himself, who has now grown enough to recognise this.

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Isolation & Redemption

What I love about Del Toro’s version is that every character is part of a self-contained Gothic world, where their very clothes are in dialogue with each other, with the sets, and with the story – but they are still all seeking some kind of human connection, with varying results. The Creature learns some very bleak lessons – everyone he cares for is taken from him, both the old blind man and Elizabeth, and his ‘father’ abandons him and rejects him. He learns self-acceptance at a terrible cost. This version of the Creature has no animal comforter, but kills wolves and comes to understand his place in the food chain and the dispassionate nature of the natural order: “The world will hunt you and kill you for who you are.” Yet, at the end of the film, he comes to an optimistic moment of embracing the sunrise, and stepping into the light. This is an important moment, but he does so on his own – this is a film about self-acceptance and self-discovery, about breaking generational cycles, and stepping into one’s own future, unshackled by the past. I like this, but for me, these types of stories lack the added dimensions of community.

What I love about Irmak’s version is that every single character has at least one friend, even if they are not part of wider society. They all have a hook to bring them back into community, if they can bring themselves to use it. Ihsan is so close to being restored to his living community when his only friend Hamdi lets him rest at his restaurant, but doesn’t recognise him, and Ihsan cannot communicate at that time, nor can he fully recall who Hamdi is. Ihsan’s living choices led him to reject society, and the family and care that Hamdi represents, and now after his rebirth, he is not able to reclaim what he rejected. Yet he is nevertheless provided with other companions and people who encourage him to find his own truth, his own sense of self, even as that is measured once more in loss and suffering. Even so, while human (and animal) connection is not necessarily sought after, it is given freely. People can be bad, but they can also be good; they can be cruel, but they can also be loving and generous. People are always simply people. Ihsan relearns all these lessons, and relearns his own compassion in the process, but at the cost of deep suffering. Yet, there is always the hope and the desire for community, for connection, for love, and that is what resonates with me so deeply about this whole piece. I love how Ziya deteriorates in the process of his flight, until he and Ihsan remain reflections of each other. I love how they get back together after a great struggle, and are only whole when they are reconciled. Only then are they free to go their own ways.

I think what sums up both adaptations is the idea that if you stop searching, stop seeking, stop striving, for something better than you have, there is no hope left. And the message of both versions is to ultimately embrace that hope, whether that comes from self-acceptance and understanding, or if it comes from religious redemption, or if comes from a return to community and a hope for closer connections. And whatever that is, that really resonates with me, too.

BACK

I think I’m going to leave this comparison alone for now, as this is already far too long, but if you have made it to the end, thank you for sticking with me.

I have so much more I could say – but perhaps another time.

In the meantime, I would highly recommend the two adaptations.

Like This? Try These:

• #AmReading: Body Gothic by Xavier Aldana Reyes Date January 1, 2020
• Goth is [not] Dead: (Sub)Genre-Chat Date March 8, 2019
• From Romancing the Gothic Blog: 100 Women Writers in Horror, the Gothic and Supernatural Fiction from the 18th Century to 2021 Date March 14, 2021

#gothicBooks #gothicFiction #gothicFilm #gothicHorror #longread

The Castle of Otranto: Retelling When

With all the hype (justified) around Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein, I’ve just finished listening to The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764), recording/narration by Thomas A. Copeland, the novel that spawned the Gothic by dropping a giant helmet on a sickly bridegroom and killing him stone-dead on the day of his wedding. (Click the title above for the Project Gutenberg eBook).

If you’re curious about ‘the first Gothic novel’, here are some fun starters for you to check out:

Articles

The Castle of Otranto, Wikipedia
The Castle of Otranto: The creepy tale that launched Gothic fiction, BBC Magazine, 2014
The Castle of Otranto, Encyclopaedia Britannica
Backlash: Romantic Reactions to The Castle of Otranto and England’s Gothic Craze, Andrew Reszitnyk, 2012
Classics: The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, The Gothic Library, 2018
Review: The Castle of Otranto, The Grub Street Lodger, 2022

Videos

Introduction to the Book

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFPce9aIBls

Introduction to the Author

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zMMPdMUrZM

Introduction to Walpole’s Gothic House as Inspiration

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bvDsPQmeAw

The Gothic has always been queer and transgressive, even from its inception (where incestuous/inappropriate m/f relationships are a possible stand-in for repressed homosexual desires), but this particular novel has not had the same kind of adaptation treatment as its more famous successors. That is, frankly, because it’s bananas.

There is one adaptation:

•  Otrantský zámek / The Castle of Otranto dir. Jan Švankmajer (1977) – an 18min animated Czech short based on Walpole’s novel. Švankmajer’s pseudo-documentary follows an amateur archaeologist and his exploration of the setting of Otranto Castle, which he believes is in Czechoslovakia, not Italy. (Watch on DailyMotion, also available on BFI Player).

Book Plot

Let’s break this down. Spoilers ahoy.

Here’s a handy Character List.

The whole thing is that the giant ghost of Alphonso is haunting the castle to fulfil a prophecy, that the Castle of Otranto will pass from the present family when the real owner (Alphonso’s ghost) grows too large to inhabit it. He takes the form of a gigantic, armoured knight, but the characters only see bits of him at any one time until the big climax.

The first glimpse we get of this is his helmet, crashing down from the sky without an explanation or any warning, and landing on the only heir to the castle (Conrad), as he crosses the courtyard on the way to his own wedding.

Later, servants are terrified at the sight of a giant leg in the gallery, and an arm somewhere else.

A group of mysterious knights rock up with a giant sabre they found in Joppa while on the Crusades, guided to it by a hermit who shows up later as a skeleton, and reunite the sabre with the helmet and Alphonso’s gigantic armoured ghost then puts in a brief appearance.

The plot, such as there is, revolves around the prophecy and the doomed family: Manfred is the current Prince of Otranto, and he’s a dickhead. He has one son, Conrad, who gets squashed like a bug in Chapter One, and a daughter Matilda who is the clever one he totally ignores. His pious wife Hippolita exists to pray and serve his whims, even when that extends to annulling their marriage on dubious grounds.

Matilda has a maid called Bianca, who is the sassy but loyal one who enjoys gossip and drama.

Conrad‘s bride is Isabella, Manfred’s ward, whose father, Frederic, is believed dead while on Crusade.

Well, Conrad’s squished, so Manfred has an absolute meltdown, as there goes his only son and heir. If Matilda marries, then Otranto will pass from his family line to her husband’s, and he can’t be having that for Ego Reasons. So he does the only sane thing a man can do in that position: proposes to Isabella, who is his daughter’s age, and tries to annul his own marriage so he can marry her legally and get some more sons.

Also, he wants to know what the hell just happened, and in the confusion he arrests a (suspiciously well-spoken) peasant, Theodore, whom he mistakenly believes is somehow responsible for the helmet catastrophe. He imprisons Theodore under the helmet. It doesn’t help that Theodore strongly resembles Alphonso, the ancestral owner of the castle… Hmmm I wonder what that secret could be that we’re probably going to find out later…

Isabella, horrified by her father-in-law’s proposal, runs away. The ghost of Manfred’s grandad comes out of a painting and scares a few people witless. Theodore manages to escape the helmet and meets Isabella, and helps her to escape. He then decides not to impugn her honour by escaping too, in case people think she has escaped with him, and so he … goes back under the helmet.

There is some shenanigans where Matilda fancies him too, and a bit of a love triangle but where each lady tries to out-pious the other by sacrificing her happiness for the other’s happiness, and tries to yield their claims to him. It turns out he’s into Matilda.

More shenanigans ensue with the action happening off stage, like a Greek drama, with Manfred being alerted to a giant ghost by servants rushing in and not being able to give him accurate information, very much in a comedy of miscommunication sketch style. (These scenes would work really well on stage).

Anyway, Isabella goes and hides out in a monastery with Fr. Jerome. Jerome is actually Theodore’s dad, in his Before the Monastery days, and they are both (surprise!) nobility. Theodore actually has a claim to Otranto. That’s why he talks like a nobleman and looks exactly like the late Alphonso. He is the rightful heir! What a surprising twist.

Theodore escapes Manfred’s wrath and again finds Isabella hiding out in tunnels and trying to escape Manfred.

Meanwhile, visitors to the castle have brought a giant sabre to the door, and their leader is a mysterious knight (about Manfred’s age). The sabre was shown to them by a wise old holy hermit near Joppa, and they’ve brought it to Otranto for Prophecy Reasons.

The mystery leader goes in search of the missing Isabella and finds Theodore protecting her. Theodore thinks the Mystery Man has been sent by Manfred and they duel. Theodore wounds Mystery Man, and it turns out… he’s just stabbed Isabella’s missing dad, Frederic. Oops.

Fortunately, it’s not fatal, there’s a touching reunion, and Isabella accompanies her wounded father and Theodore back to Otranto. Manfred again tries to execute Theodore even though it’s obvious by now he has nothing to do with the whole ghost giant thing, and Fr. Jerome confesses that Theodore is his son. There’s more shenanigans, and Manfred eventually relents.

Manfred now proposes to Frederic that if Frederic will let Manfred marry Isabella, Frederic can marry Matilda.

Matilda, who is in love with Theodore, who has spent all his time “saving” Isabella (badly), is not pleased at the thought of marrying Isabella’s dad.

Hippolita piously prepares for divorce and is no use whatsoever.

Frederic gets a visit from the holy old hermit who showed him where the giant sabre was, but the old monk is now a skeleton who terrifies him, and warns him against marrying Matilda.

Matilda goes to be with Theodore, but Manfred is insanely jealous and believes Theodore and Isabella are an item. He catches them together, believes it’s Isabella, and runs her through in a rage. It turns out he’s just killed his own daughter.

Matilda dies peacefully and piously, with much forgiveness and weeping all around.

At some point – GIANT GHOST appears.

Theodore marries Isabella instead, but basically vows to spend the rest of his life mourning for his lost love, Matilda. He ends up with the castle, and everyone lives miserably ever after.

Feature Film Adaptation

If you’re thinking, that would be a cool plot without the weird supernatural fever dream nonsense, you could read Clara Reeve’s retelling/adaptation/loosely based novel, The Old English Baron (1778), edited by Mrs Bridgen (daughter of the author and painter, Samuel Richardson). This novel was another major player in the development of Gothic fiction, and can be read online.

However, I would personally love to see something wilder and more contemporary.

Hear me out:

Modern-day religious cult family terrified of a ghostly giant prophecy. They’re very rich so we’re sticking with the names as not out of place. I’m leaning to super-rich US Americans, actually, as there’s that very culturally specific brand of US entitlement to European spaces when they can claim a bit of heritage in that place, without much understanding of what that actually means, or any grasp of the cultural norms and laws and so on. (No, not all US Americans… but definitely some of them).

The setting is a castle that Manfred has bought which has a caveat that it’s only his if he has got signed permission from the true heir, but the heir cannot be found. Manfred has been Doing Genealogy and believes this is his birthright, although prior to this he’s never been out of his state before. He has become rabid and weird about this, and has made it his whole identity and personality. He’s now hosting his son’s wedding there.

I think what would be a really fun device here is that, just like the novel claimed to be a ‘found manuscript’, this is ‘found footage’, but you get a mix of ‘footage’ (what is real and filmed), and character POV film, so you can see what they are seeing/think they see.

People find the footage in real time but it cuts out at inopportune moments or gets obscured, so it’s easy to get the wrong end of the stick from watching/listening to things back, and that propels the miscommunication and assumptions.

Manfred is the patriarch, but slimy and Mr Collins-like (thanks for that visual, Sam Hirst).
Hippolita is the perfect trad wife, but has no personality of her own outside of Bible Study and baking.
Matilda is the dutiful daughter who runs Hippolita’s trad wife social media.
Bianca is the sassy influencer hired for the wedding, who ends up feeling sorry for Matilda even as she sucks up to her for exposure and collabs.
Isabella was taken in by the family after her dad went missing on a mission trip. She’s being married off to Conrad, the weedy son, and is pretty miserable about it.

At this point, I reckon that the whole wedding party is spiked with hallucinogens or exposed to something in the ‘fairytale castle’ where the wedding is due to take place.

Time warps – the whole novel only takes a few days, a lot of Plot is tightly packed into a short space of time, so I think all the supernatural stuff could be explained either a bad trip, or as something they’re actually opening themselves to seeing.

Conrad could have been crushed by falling masonry (the castle is unsafe). But because of the prophecy, everyone sees it as a helmet – the power of mass suggestion, or actually a giant helmet?

We aren’t sure, because we see Groom Cam footage of Conrad (everyone’s wearing a camera for the wedding video compilation) getting crushed to death, but we’re not sure what by. Then someone screams that it’s a giant helmet, and all hell breaks loose.

You can then have reels and TikToks from Matilda and Bianca, with the scripted Lives vs the reality off-screen contrasted as things get increasingly weirder and weirder. As most of the action happens off screen in the book, you can have that happening here too, as people start tripping out and getting increasingly erratic and unreliable. The Guest Cam/Bride Cam/Social Media footage is only marginally helpful, as it doesn’t fully reveal things, only provide more questions and muddy the already muddied waters.

The group of armed knights who come with the giant sabre could be a gang who steal and smuggle antiquities out of different countries, perhaps the way the religious group/cult is funded, with Frederic as the mystery leader. He’s looking for his daughter Isabella, of course.

(I also think this works with the whole grooming theme, and older men marrying much younger wives, and the idea of Isabella’s dad agreeing to her marriage to Manfred as long as he gets to have Matilda.)

The sabre itself is an antiquity belonging to the castle, and is indeed brought back by Isabella’s missing father, but as they come under the strange influence of whatever it is going on there, they also start buying into the hysteria of ghosts and giants, and start seeing the sabre as enormous, and their stories of how they found it get as warped as the rest of the narrative.

Theodore is a local lad that Manfred wants to get rid of, because it’s fairly obvious he is the true heir. It does turn out he’s the son of the local priest, Jerome, who is there by law or something, to be present at the wedding.

(A little twist might be that Jerome is responsible for the hallucinations, to ruin the wedding and try to stall it so that Theodore can take his place as the rightful heir, but he didn’t realise how out of control things would get as a result. In the book, he obfuscates and tries to conceal things from Manfred, and this also has unintended negative consequences, so I think that fits. It would mean that he had a grand plan in advance, and it all falls to bits).

Bianca is the only one with any sense, and it’s not clear (either from her footage or her ‘off camera’ scenes) whether she is under the influence of anything, or if she’s worked out what’s happening and is stirring the paranormal paranoia.

However… obviously this goes very wrong, and ends up with a jealous Manfred stabbing his own daughter in a case of mistaken identity, and Matilda’s death.

I think this could work, and be really weird and messed up, as well as quite funny in places.

I want Samara Weaving and Mia Goth in this.

Directed by Ben Wheatley [A Field in England (2013), Meg 2: The Trench (2023)] because that man has range.

OR

Directed by Angela Bassett (I loved her series of American Horror Story which has a very similar device of found footage vs viewing outside that device).

OR

Directed by an indie Italian director who maybe wants to say something about the selling off of Italian land and homes to foreigners, and have the whole film be about the underlying issues with that (focused around Theodore’s rightful inheritance).

I don’t know!

Anyway, that’s my adaptation idea… someone who knows how to do screenwriting should get on that, I reckon.

#CastleOfOtranto #gothicBooks #Review

I only have about thirty pages left to read of Mariana Enriquez's novel Our Share of Night, which I have absolutely devoured. I am terrified because I dread the ending, which I can only imagine will be tragic (I hope I am wrong, and perhaps I am). I don't know if I'm ready, but what a fantastic read! I highly recommend it.
#literature #MarianaEnriquez #OurShareOfNight #horrorliterature #gothicbooks

My book Witch's Familiar & Whimsical Stories is appropriate reading all year round, but especially this time of year.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0CVQTPYSS/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&dib_tag=se&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.tfQoz8HnKf2VombwqWN6ceNs9aoSJw0fCg6SP_N95VaUXN9mBlHPTh43SnuWTlJZ8GUmJmEgUtqkTU54yC0ofnkSLHBRIr3cSPU4yYu8mY_03qVChv-WFP3p2X5DIs528wt14gm8wp2njj9s8TQuljFTydNwLkI5v1lThRBvCc15NqXMD1hBUT-MEkyVjK-dHbGFc8c1EgXbYbxWM00ahQ.NAHE-CcYMjQsp3w8LXhwxz0aJlYUf40fxJbxXqYq7cc&qid=1725151995&sr=8-1

#WritingCommunity #Witches #dragons #blackcats #gothic #gothicliterature #gothicbooks #writing #Halloween #SpookySeason #Samhain

Author Spotlight: Gothic SFF Author Morgan Dante

Morgan Dante (they/them) is an author of romance, fantasy, and horror. They especially enjoy Gothic literature and vampires.

Their best known works are the cosmic horror romance Providence Girls and the Judas Iscariot/The Devil romance The Saint of Heartbreak.

Author Links

Author website: morgandante.com

TikTok: @morgandante
Instagram: @mdantesinferno
Bluesky: morgandante.bsky.social
Twitter: @morgansinferno
Tumblr: ghostpoetics

We’re here to spotlight your work, which falls under the dark Gothic queer romance umbrella. What is your relationship with Gothic Romance, and how did you come to write it?

I love Gothic romance, whether it’s contemporary Gothic romance or the more nineteenth-century use of the word, such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. When it comes to writing it, for the longest time, I have always preferred reading, watching, and writing horror. It is the number one genre to me.

I have always been interested in the macabre, especially when it intermingles with sexuality and desire. I find the themes of grief, trauma, repression, and obsession all intriguing to explore in the context of the Gothic. I studied a lot of Gothic literature when I was getting my BA in English, and I enjoy everything I mentioned as well as the complicated depiction of dark subjects and the grotesque.

What queer rep can readers expect to find in your work, and how do queerness and Gothic romance fit together in it?

This is an excellent question, albeit a complicated one. Most of my characters, though not all, are bisexual. I am bisexual, and I tend to just default to that. As someone who, for a long time, has identified from genderqueer to trans masc, I tend to write characters who, even if they are technically cis, are gender non-conforming.

They have discomfort with their gender, and I tend to believe even cishet people can experience these feelings and should be given space to explore these experiences, too; but sometimes with a fictional character, depending on what part of their character journey you’re writing about, they may not be entirely cognizant of how to process their feelings.

This is especially true in historical pieces in societies where concepts like homosexuality were more tied to physical actions rather than seen as complex identities and communities until a certain point in time. And of course, while trans people have existed for a long time, there is no singular idea of what being trans means. Many cultures do not use the same framing for identities and communities that people in the U.S. do, as America is a melting pot but only one part of the world.

Azzie from Providence Girls deals with complicated feelings about her gender; overall, she does have body dysmorphia, but there is also some dysphoria, too. As per “The Thing on the Doorstep,” she is wary of her more masculine traits because her father switched her soul with his and lived in her body. Her more masculine traits are not bad or a sign of wrongness, though she wonders if these aspects of her are a “residue” of the magical spell he inflicted on her, but she was wearing pants and smoking cigars as a kid before he did that. She struggles with feeling disconnected from her body.

Just when she tries to become comfortable in her body, she begins transforming. She’s half-Deep One, and in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, it is established that human men were forced to have Deep One wives; the Deep Ones from the sea are said to be female, but I am not necessarily sure whether these fish-people from an ancient underwater city would necessarily have the same binary.

I am interested in how we perform gender as impressed upon us by society.

Léon in A Flame in the Night and Witch Soul is genderqueer; he was a soldier, but living in 1920s Paris, he is generally rather feminine and okay with that. He is okay with being called a man, but he does also occasionally refer to himself with she/her, although it might not be immediately evident because he does it when he refers to himself in French. He likes to knit and also likes to wear dresses.

Same with Lucifer in The Saint of Heartbreak. While I do occasionally label The Saint of Heartbreak as “technically” M/M, Lucifer is not a man, even if he uses he/him; I view fallen angels as not being born with gender and viewing a lot of labels and roles as arbitrary. He does not mind what people call him, and when I wrote about him and Lilith, I mention that both of them were pregnant with children, and there are times he has different genitalia and other times where I don’t explicitly mention what genitalia he has because I find it superfluous to getting the point across, and it has no bearing on what gender he considers himself. It just isn’t something he thinks about, and being reminded of it by a mortal tends to momentarily bemuse or frustrate him.

As for Gothic romance, I find that a lot of Gothic literature, in exploring themes like emotional reactions to trauma and desire, have often conflicting but intriguing depictions of gender. We have Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, which we can view as very much a “lesbian preys on an innocent girl” negative stereotype, but also, there are few things as darkly romantic as lines like “to die as lovers may, to die together so that they may live together.”

Bram Stoker’s Dracula has plenty of conflicting discourse about its depiction of women. Jonathan Harker essentially takes on the role of the Gothic heroine who is trapped in a castle with the monster, who cooks and cleans for him. Dracula tells his brides that Jonathan belongs to him and carries him to bed after Jonathan passes out. Jonathan, horribly traumatized from the abuse and his escape, begins to fixate on his kukri knife, a phallic object; after being a relatively mild-mannered man traumatized by Dracula, he seems to lean into violence as a way to reclaim himself. However, his most grounding trait is his love and devotion for Mina.

The text creates a clear dichotomy between the good woman (Mina) and the bad woman who becomes more seductive as a vampire (the brides, Lucy). Mina, a woman who works, lives while her upperclass sensitive and innocent friend dies twice. Mina herself is critical of the New Woman, a woman who challenges social roles, while she herself challenges them.

Van Helsing says that Mina is a good woman because she has the heart of a woman and the brain of a man, which reinforces the sexist idea of women=emotion and men=logical. However, without Mina copying their notes and using her psychic connection to Dracula after his nightly assault, they would not have defeated Dracula.

Her mix of competence and compassion are engaging. It’s actually the men’s efforts to exclude her, even if out of a chauvinistic idea of protecting her because they care for her, that lead to negative consequences; even while she’s afflicted, they defeat Dracula with Mina.

The lines that are seemingly stark aren’t; it’s a novel of contradictions written by an Anglo-Irish Protestant man who was fascinated by scientific progress but not especially revolutionary. A man who was close friends with Oscar Wilde (Bram Stoker’s wife, actress Florence Balcombe, was with Oscar Wilde until she married Stoker and broke Wilde’s heart), visiting Oscar Wilde after his imprisonment, but then becoming vehemently homophobic in old age.

It is important to view the book in its own time; yes, there are many things by contemporary stands that are regressive, and even aspects from the 1890s, but there is also transgression and places to find queer subtext.

To me, Gothic romance and Gothic horror are great places to explore liminal and uncertain spaces, and queerness is all about questioning and expanding these ideas.

What is the interplay between monstrosity and attraction in your work, and why do you find yourself returning to these themes?

I consider Providence Girls to be a monster romance, and vampires are my favorite monsters.

Ocean Vuong once said, “To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.” I am interested in monstrosity as a way to show acceptance, a very “come as you are” idea.

Vin cares about Azzie turning into a monster because it’s a very painful transformation, but she isn’t deterred or unattracted to her because of that; she would be perfectly happy having a Deep One as her eternal companion, and indeed she is when they reunite. I am also compelled by the dual nature of monsters as both “shelter and warning.”

Yes, a vampire is dangerous. They are monsters who need blood to live, but also, they have the power to keep those they love safe–or to keep themselves safe.

For Noémie in Unholy With Eyes Like Wolves, vampirism means freedom, but it has a price; it isn’t a wholly good thing. Erzsébet at the ending is still grieving after all she has endured.

Vampirism in particular for me is interesting because I do consider it as a possible vehicle for transgression and freedom because one has the strength and powers to do things that were previously off-limits, but if the vampirism wasn’t asked for, there is an element of violation that leads to some messy and complicated feelings that could be intriguing to explore if done right; I am always bothered at analysis of Dracula that sees Dracula’s assaults on Lucy and Mina as him bestowing them with positive transgressiveness, a gift he has given the women, as the ways they are interesting women exist before he forces them to feed from his breast–which, very interesting portrayal!

I am obsessed with the maternal imagery Stoker decided to employ by having Mina feed by drinking from Dracula’s chest. But I don’t like him getting the credit for making the women interesting and transgressive…by traumatizing them. All that said, I return to monsters to explore themes of love and loneliness from the perspective of outsiders.

In PROVIDENCE GIRLS: A sapphic horror romance set in Great Depression New England, one of the women is changing into a Deep One (Lovecraftian mythos, from HP Lovecraft’s story THE SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH. What was the inspiration behind this story, and what did you most enjoy about writing and developing it?

Providence Girls has three primary inspirations, all written by H.P. Lovecraft: “The Thing on the Doorstep” (Asenath Waite); “The Dunwich Horror” (Lavinia Whateley); and The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

Azzie and Vin are of course from the first two stories, and “The Thing on the Doorstep” mentions that Asenath is from Innsmouth and has oddly large eyes that hint at her being a Deep One hybrid.

If the events of the short story were different, she likely would have begun transforming sometime, which was part of the inspiration.

Back in 2018, I became ill from a stomach ulcer and spent a good amount of time wiped out. During this time, I read a used collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories cover to cover. Reading these stories chronologically was great because you see the change in writing and the way many of the stories connect and old characters return.

Lovecraft was a flawed and deeply bigoted man.

It is fascinating, however, how creators from Victor LaValle to Ruthanna Emrys to Guillermo del Toro engage with his stories, many of them giving voices to characters (and real life people) he maligned.

LaValle gives a perspective to one of the Black men in Red Hook who are vilified “The Horror at Red Hook.”

Emrys explores the perspective of a Deep One character interned by the government and then released.

Del Toro explores how disabled and queer characters empathize with the fish monster.

These artists humanize the Lovecraftian “villains” and show another side, monsters as mirrors and figures of empathy. Lovecraft, also a writer of contradiction, reviled outsiders and depicted many of them horribly, but he also excelled at writing outsiders.

He even wrote a short story called “The Outsider” where the lonely main character proclaims, “I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.”

Though there is no excuse for him racism, and he became slightly more open to others (but never fully conceding all his repugnant views) as he aged, Lovecraft died poor and struggled with emotional abuse from his mother and suicidal ideation. He was a deeply reactionary and afraid man. It is interesting to see the change in his narratives once we get to The Shadow Over Innsmouth.

In earlier works like “Dagon,” the work typically follows the premise of the narrator recounting a horror he experienced in the past and, succumbing to madness, possibly planning his suicide.

Characters who are traumatized or different experience monstrosity and want to die.

When we get to The Shadow Over Innsmouth, the narrator discovers after his ordeal escaping the hamlet that he is also a Deep One hybrid. This makes him suicidal, but then he accepts who he is and plans to help the other Deep Ones, apprehended by the government, escape the camps they’ve been placed in.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth is complicated because there are not especially subtle allusions to Lovecraft’s anxieties about miscegenation, but there are also aspects that made me read it as a coming out story near the end–that process of devastation and grief over being something you are told you should hate, a self-loathing that sometimes leads to thoughts of self-harm, and then finding self-acceptance.

Of course, my interpretation of the story is that the narrator is being depicted as “turning bad” and still succumbing to madness by accepting who he is. The Deep Ones are not depicted as sympathetic, after all. Mind, Lovecraft is portraying them as dangerous monsters who are rightfully placed into camps. But there are interpretations that see this less despairing ending as strangely hopeful; it’s a change in Lovecraft’s usual story progression to have the protagonist not die in this moment of embracing the horror, but to instead have some sort of ecstasy.

I was interested in the exploration of the narrator’s conflicted feelings about his inevitable change. After reading “The Thing on the Doorstep” and “The Dunwich Horror,” I was struck by the parallels between the women in these stories who would then become Azzie and Vin.

They are both women used by their occultist fathers and ultimately doomed. Lovecraft didn’t have many female characters. He was no feminist, no shock there, but while he thought that women’s minds didn’t cover the same ground as men (because of what he considered to be social conditioning rather than biology), he thought that if women had less of a capacity to be logical, the difference was negligible enough not to matter and was accepting of growing women’s independence.

His short-lived marriage, after all, was with an older woman who traveled to work, though that relationship with Sonia Greene had issues such as his outspoken antisemitism and xenophobia…while married to a Ukrainian (or what is now Ukraine) Jewish woman.

Still, however, Lovecraft viewed men and women as different in a way that made him uncomfortable writing about women. His female characters are sparse and, as we see, the most notable ones follow similar archetypes. I just thought it would be interesting if Asenath Waite and Lavinia Whateley ever met and were in a room together. What would they talk about? How would they react to their traumas? Admittedly, when the idea came, I didn’t immediately have a grasp on balancing internal and external conflicts, but I very soon realized the external conflict and ticking clock aspect to the relationship would be Azzie’s progressing transformation.

I also wanted to capture different ways of handling grief and trauma. Vin cannot let go of the past, even when she tries. She cannot let go of her sons. Azzie, on the other hand, represses and tries to think about only the present. Both of these responses are understandable and come with their own complications.

The entire story is a play between the past and present.

Despite Providence Girls being, in retrospect, one of the books I struggled to write the most, there is a lot that I enjoyed about writing it. I liked playing with the very different voices, the dreamy and languid voice of Vin compared to Azzie’s more stoic and straightforward nature. I loved looking at old photographs of East Providence and bringing the world to life. I liked playing with the generally dark and bleak cosmic horror of Outer Gods who either don’t care about humanity (Yog-Sothoth) or are outwardly hostile (Nyarlathotep), and then turning it on its head. Overall, it’s one of my proudest works.

Two of your books play with more human “monsters” or “villains” – Judas Iscariot, and Elizabeth Bathory. What research did you do for these figures, and how did you take the existing legends around them to craft them into these stories –  UNHOLY WITH EYES LIKE WOLVES and THE SAINT OF HEARTBREAK?

For research about Elizabeth Bathory, my main sources come from her private letters published by Kim L. Craft and Tony Thorne’s Countess Dracula: The Life and Times of Elisabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess.

I was always dissatisfied trying to write about her because much about Bathory focuses on the lurid, graphic depictions of murders and not her place in the world she lived in; I could never really get a sense of late sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century Hungary. It wasn’t until I read Craft’s collection of letters and Thorne’s book, although the latter I was admittedly skeptical of because of the title, that I got what I wanted: books that explored Hungarian culture and politics at the time, as well as showing what it was like to be in control of so much land as a woman whose husband was often away.

I could actually envision her world. I was always fascinated by her, even the most dramatic and wild portrayals, such as in Cradle of Filth’s album Cruelty and the Beast.

That said, I feel like a lot of portrayals of Bathory are steeped in misogyny; she is often portrayed in a way that reminds me of the “incontinent” (sexually uncontrolled, in this context) she-wolf Dante mentions at the start of Inferno: a bloodthirsty and lascivious woman who is evil most of all in her inability to control her urges.

I also feel like when mostly American and British people engage with historical figures like Bathory or Vlad the Impaler, they are focused on the most grotesque details and inevitably engage in xenophobia against Eastern Europeans.

While there was brutality because nearly all of Europe in the medieval period and early modern era had cruelty the lords inflicted on peasants or horrible war crimes, I’m always bothered by the idea of these periods being uniquely full of ignorance and bloodshed. I’m especially bothered by the depiction of Eastern Europeans as uniquely “barbaric,” bloodthirsty, and sexually deviant compared to their Western European counterparts.

This is usually tied into antisemitic tropes and a stew of negative depictions of Romanians, Hungarians, the Romani, and the Ottomans.

Besides the portrayal of the Romani as agents of the evil Count, Bram Stoker uses physiognomy–the study of facial features to determine character, which employs racist pseudo-science–to tell us that Count Dracula in his Transylvanian castle is decadent and morally corrupt.

I want to be clear: Bathory ruled over land in a time where there was a brutal suppression of peasant revolts. None of this is to say that the aforementioned historical figures did not commit violence ever. I don’t think Bathory was a perfect woman who never did anything wrong in her life. She was very likely harsh and, given that she performed the role of the feudal lord with her husband at war for much of her life, she was probably ruthless. If she were to punish someone who angered her, there is nothing to say that she didn’t engage in torture; sadly, this was no outlier. She raised taxes on the serfs without worry of recourse; that was all simply the dynamic between a feudal landowner and serfs. I don’t think she was just a kind woman, even if she did do good things as part of her duties.

However, do I believe that she murdered hundreds of women and girls and was a blood-bathing Satanist? No.

From what I have read, I am convinced that certain people imprisoned or executed for accusations of Satanic murder were victims of political plotting, an escalated personal grievance that took advantage of the devil worship/heresy hysteria, or an effort to seize land.

For Bathory, I think the Habsburg Crown was retaliating against a prominent Protestant (Calvinist) woman who insisted that they pay their debts to her.

Why the blood-bathing Satanist lesbian murderer accusation? Well, such accusations are quite literally life-ending.

Immediately after those rumors spread, and she was immured in her bedroom, she lost all her long allies because that is such a confluence of horrible things that no one wanted to defend her. Who wants to go against the Holy Roman Emperor and defend a woman accused of such horrors? After all, during Bathory’s lifetime, there had already been much tension between the Habsburg Crown, Transylvania, and the Hungarian nobles.

Incensed by the Habsburgs, István Bocskay, a Hungarian nobleman who was previously a liberator of Wallachia until the Ottomans took over again, led an attempted insurrection in Hungary and Transylvania against the Habsburgs. Once peace talks happened, his rebellion went well for him and the Hungarian nobles who sided with him, but he mysteriously fell ill and died. There was great tension between people who wanted an independent Hungary and those loyal to the Habsburgs, who were the Holy Roman Emperors.

There, too, was the tension of being a Calvinist woman, since Calvinism itself was new and controversial at this time, ruled by Catholics.

Bathory herself was careful to never state whether she supported the rebellion or an independent Hungary, even though her older brother supported it. It was a very tumultuous time of alliances and betrayals, and you could lose everything with one wrong action. Bathory tried to be careful in balancing her loyalties while remaining assertive, but in the end, she lost everything and likely died by starving herself to death.

With Unholy With Eyes Like Wolves, I wanted to depict her as not necessarily always a good woman, not always fair or kind, but complicated and navigating a tumultuous time.

Despite including bloody aspects, I tried to integrate more of the history and courtly matters.

With Judas Iscariot, I have been fascinated with him for about ten years. There are so many different ways you can interpret his character.

I am not a fan of “evil Judas” because it doesn’t gel much with the fact that he felt regret and tried to return the silver he received. Besides that, I find depictions that emphasize Jesus Christ’s death as being less the Romans’ doing and more on the “traitorous Jews who are responsible for Christ’s death” to be grossly antisemitic.

Judas in a lot of art is depicted in ways that exaggerate his “Jewishness” with a dramatically hooked nose and red hair whereas Jesus, also a Jew, is depicted as a very bland white guy.

Judas is someone often maligned and used as shorthand for a traitor, but as Oscar Wilde put it, “each man kills the thing he loves.”

Judas is singularly seen as irredeemable, except for another figure: the Devil, who is often seen as beyond God’s all-encompassing forgiveness.

I like exploring the tragedy of Judas’ character, someone who made understandable mistakes and was fearful of how others would be hurt during the rebellion against the Roman Empire.

The rebellion against the enslaving, imperial Romans was of course just, but it isn’t a stretch for Judas to be scared of what Jesus’ actions would mean for the Jewish population subjugated by Rome.

Multiple times, including after Jesus’ death, Rome brutally quelled Jewish riots and enslaved and killed many people. And Judas, portrayed here as a former slave, knows the horrors of Roman power well. He was mistaken to trust Pontius Pilate, but Judas only hoped that Jesus would reconsider what was drawing the most Roman scrutiny; he was horrified and devastated to learn what his actions really meant.

I’m also compelled by narrative parallels. Dante places Satan, Judas, Brutus, and Cassius in the worst part of Hell, the final section of the ninth circle, because they are regarded as the worst traitors.

The Devil betrayed God, and Judas betrayed Jesus, and they are therefore the most loathed and lonely souls in Hell.

In The Saint of Heartbreak, after all the grief and pain, the Devil has closed himself off from feeling love, while Judas is deep down a very compassionate and sensitive man, but they don’t understand one another.

Judas’ depiction is very much an exploration of grief and the circular nature of depression and self-loathing; taken from Dante, Hell is designed as a circle that perpetuates collective pain.

I don’t take a good and evil approach to biblical figures; neither Heaven nor Hell are wholly bad or good. I try to view all characters through the lens of their lived experiences and how that informs their flaws and ways of seeing the world. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they can’t be bad, but I seek to make all characters compelling and human in some way.

Both  UNHOLY WITH EYES LIKE WOLVES and SACRAMENT are vampire stories – one sapphic, one achillean. Can you tell us more about the vampire lore incorporated into your stories, and how this blends with the romantic and erotic elements?

I don’t have a strict Morgan Dante vampire lore, so these two books are in some ways very different, but they are both very Gothic, bisexual polycules.

With vampires, I love exploring autonomy, hunger, and desire. Both Unholy With Eyes Like Wolves and Sacrament explore the idea of freedom, although in very different ways; vampirism is more liberating in Unholy Eyes than it is in Sacrament, which has a messier kind of power system involved that makes immortality at times more of a prison.

Both stories, in terms of eroticism, explore themes of power, transgression, and tenderness.

Noémie learns what she wants and what she can do outside of her assigned social role, and Sebestyen begins to change once the main character, Maël, is gentle with him when Maël has every reason to resent him and, in Sebestyen’s mind, continue the cycle of abuse.

With vampirism, it is hard not to acknowledge how power and violence coincide with sex and how characters contend with that and try to find tenderness regardless.

Sex is very important in both of these books in terms of character development and vulnerability. In one way or another, characters who are repressed socially or emotionally (or both) learn about themselves through intimacy.

What can readers look forward to from you in the future?

I have been cycling through different projects, all Gothic and having to do with demons or vampires.

My most pressing project at the moment is an MMF romance that I can best describe as Gaston x Belle x Beast for Beauty and the Beast fans who enjoy a complicated polycule and just really want the Beast to stay a beast.

As a lifelong fan of the animated film, I’m very excited to share this story, although the time period and many elements are darker and very different.

I am also running a Kickstarter for a special edition hardcover of Unholy With Eyes Like Wolves.

Overall, I have many projects I’m excited to share!

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Author Spotlight: Queer Romantasy Author Ian Haramaki

Ian Haramaki (he/him) is an author of queer fiction and illustrator of twinks and creatures.

When not writing, he is peddling his wares at fan conventions across the country.

His debut novel is titled MERCY, and he has been included in Devout: An Anthology of Angels edited by Quinton Li, as well as A Queer and Cozy Winter by Rainbow Crate.

Author Links:

Website: cometkins.com

Mercy: books2read.com/MercyNovel

Bluesky: @cometkins.bsky.social
Instagram: @cometkins
TikTok: @cometkinsart
Tumblr: @cometkins

What drew you to writing queer, dark, romantasy for your debut, and can you share some of your writing influences?

I was drawn to this genre in specific because of the origin on these characters. They were originally player characters in a Magic the Gathering based Dungeons and Dragons game.

Ilya was part of the Orzhov guild, while Danya began life as an ex-Boros-turned-Izzet tinkerer. They were very different in that game, but the dark, gothic vibes of the Orzhov guild became the biggest influence for the book.

I’ve always enjoyed the dark and gothic anyway, but that was the main draw of inspiration. My biggest writing influences, on the other hand, are my friends. They’re all so incredible and skilled, and I keep pushing myself to match their caliber of work. I’ve found enjoying their stories and examining how they string words together has done wonders for me.

What are the main themes in Mercy and did these evolve organically through the writing process, or were they deliberate choices?

I think the biggest takeaway from Mercy that I hope other people have, is that there’s always hope for a better future. Sometimes it takes the right person or circumstances to force you forward, but there will be something good on the other side.

I never set out with particular themes in mind when I wrote Mercy, truly the only thought was spite initially, but as the world and characters evolved, I think this became evident. I try to not be too blatant with these things, since it can sometimes feel annoying when the message is too hand-hold-y personally, but I hope that much is clear.

What queer rep can be found in your work, and how do you approach the combination of queerness, Gothic lit, and religious themes?

Mercy specifically contains Gay and Bisexual rep, and my short story for Rainbow Crate, Sir Gawain and His Green Knights, contains a trans masculine character.

I think queerness and the gothic have always gone hand in hand, being that it often deals with the taboo.

While I don’t find queerness itself taboo (as I hope is evident), exploring the feelings that come with being considered taboo, something to be shoved down and aside, is important to me.

A conversation with Oyuna in the book is almost word for word one I had with my own grandmother when it came to her grappling with my transness.

The religious aspect of Mercy has also been fun to explore, speaking as somebody who is actually an atheist.

My own conclusions that I’ve come to over the years are that religion can be a powerful tool for good and evil both. I try to condemn only those that abuse their faith, not those that hold it at all. I also find that there’s divinity in queerness, in self discovery. Love is the most divine thing in the world, and being able to love when the world at large doesn’t want you to is the greatest expression of it.

What did you draw upon in terms of influences, research etc., for the worldbuilding and the angel’s character?

The aforementioned Magic the Gathering is still my greatest influence pull for sure; the biggest thing to know is that the city of Ravnica, where that original DnD campaign took place, is based primarily on eastern Europe.

I took my research to these locations and scoured articles for what I thought would best fit the story.

On top of that, I took acquired knowledge from documentaries and my own antiquing for the late 20s setting.

Danya can be quite anachronistic (on purpose, because I think it’s funny the divine being is so odd and modern), but I swear, everything else is period accurate! They had phones and showers and electric stoves in the 20s! Post industrial revolution tech moved shockingly quick, and I didn’t watch old men repairing radios on youtube for nothing, lol.

What romance tropes can readers expect to find in this book, and what are your favourite tropes to write/read?

The main tropes are probably hurt/comfort (love me some whump), forced proximity, “touch him and die”, and what I like to cheekily call “slow burn for impatient people”.

It’s not actually slow burn, but the way people yell at me about Ilya and Danya’s immediate chemistry, you’d think I’d been edging everybody for 300 pages before they kissed!

I’m personally fond of anything that involves protector/protected as well, and things like friends to lovers. I enjoy when people have a bond together before they get involved.

What are your favourite reader responses to the novel?

Any time somebody tells me they’ve cried because of the book, honestly. It’s always a shock!

One of the first influencers I sent the book to told me she cried twice! I’m a bit emotionally stunted, and it takes a lot to get strong emotion out of me like that, so it’s fascinating to hear.

It’s also really moving to have something you’ve written stir such a powerful response in somebody.

My writing may not be for everybody, but for those it appeals to, it REALLY appeals. It’s completely irreplaceable, and I hope every writer can find at least one reader who responds to their work so strongly.

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#AuthorLife #WritingSociety #WritersCommunity #GothicBooks #HorrorRomance #PrideBooks #LGBTBooks #GothicShelf #OwnVoices #MentalHealthRecovery

#AuthorsLife #WritersLife #IWriteStuff #WritingSociety #WritersCommunity #GothicBooks #HorrorRomance #IndieAuthor #Authors

Meet Amanda Leanne and the Gothic supernatural world of Darkling Cloud. @TheAmandaLeanne #HorrorBooks #GothicBooks #AuthorInterview #AuthorSpotlight

https://cmrosens.com/2025/05/30/author-spotlight-amanda-leanne/

It's not forbidden to get discouraged. What I do forbid myself is to give up. Someone has to say yes at some point.

...

No está prohibido desmotivarse. Lo que sí me prohíbo es rendirme. Alguien tiene que decir que sí en algún momento.

...

#AuthorsLife #WritersLife #WritingSociety #WritersCommunity #GothicBooks #IndieAuthor #AuthorsSociety #BookishCommunity #Bookshelves #FantasyBooks

Meet @emrowene (he/they) and their web serial "Fractured Magic", a gothic epic fantasy in 3 volumes! Catch up with the story so far. #Fantasy #Gothic #FantasyBooks #GothicBooks #WebSerial

https://cmrosens.com/2025/03/07/author-spotlight-em-rowene/

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The Entity by Frank De Felitta

#Books #horrorbooks #gothicbooks #halloween2024 #halloween2024countdown #paranormalbooks #supernaturalbooks #ghosts #ghoststories #ghosthunting

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Mother by C.M. Adler

#books #horrorbooks #gothicbooks #halloween2024 #darkfairytale #fairytaleretelling

BOOKS FOR HALLOWEEN

Cabal by Clive Barker

#books #horrorbooks #gothicbooks #halloween2024 #clivebarker

BOOKS FOR HALLOWEEN

At Gehenna's Door (childhood favourite) by Peter Beere

#books #horrorbooks #gothicbooks #halloween2024

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Flowers in the Attic

#books #horrorbooks #gothicbooks #flowersintheattic #halloween2024

Reading time!
"GOTH CHIC a connoisseur's guide to dark culture". From Gavin Baddeley.
Need to read some information about Gothic literature and choose one book to read in the next weeks!
#Gothic #Goth #GothicLiterature #GothicBooks
#Books #BooksToRead #BooksWorthReading

Work in Progress 🖤🖤🖤

#illustration #illustrationartists #drawing #ombre #gothicart #darkart #darkillustration #darkcomics #darkbooks #gothicbooks #絵描きさんと繋がりたい #イラスト好きさんと繋がりたい #絵 #pixiv #pixivコミック #pixivSketch #pixivFANBOX #pixivRequest #pixivリクエストプランシェアCP #pixiv小説

Curo un Laboratorio Introspettivo di Disegno e Immaginazione. Questo è uno dei miei esercizi.

#gothicbooks
#絵描きさんと繋がりたい #イラスト好きさんと繋がりたい #絵 #pixiv #pixivコミック #pixivSketch #pixivFANBOX #pixivRequest #pixivリクエストプランシェアCP #pixiv小説