Exploring Gothic Horror Themes in Yelen & Yelena

YELEN & YELENA has several Gothic Horror elements. I’m going to provide some moderately spoiler-free examples below, then do a deep dive into some of the stronger horror themes/examples.

Sensuality, love and loss bound up together in an eerie, haunting settingAn isolated castle in the rot-infested forestUnnatural and uncanny situations (where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, e.g. discovering out-of-season foods at a Midsummer banquet in the middle of winter)A pragmatic heroine in distress trying to regain her agency and autonomy while navigating serious power imbalances (not in her favour)A brooding, burdened, male protagonist haunted by his brutish past, whose rotten castle’s appearance reflects his own fractured psycheDoubling Folk belief in spirits (that may or may not be the ghosts of the dead gods) alongside the mainstream religious beliefsInsidious, unstoppable, untameable forces working against the protagonistsDeath, suicide, murder, and a dark atmosphereCorruption and critique of officials, rulers and systems

I’ve probably missed a few, but that’s enough to be getting on with!

Now you can see how Yelen & Yelena is Gothic, let’s look in more detail at why it’s also horror:

Sporror & Body Horror

There is a lot of body horror in Y&Y. It primarily relates to the rot, a magical fungal plague that emanates from the forest around the village. Once touched by the rot, it eats into your flesh and bones, so swift amputation is necessary. If spores are inhaled, there is no known cure. It infects soil, livestock, anything it touches.

A lot of this was influenced by the Foot and Mouth crisis in 2001. I can remember the images of burning livestock on TV, and local farms being under threat. At the start of Y&Y, the village is ringed by burning ditches to keep the rot back. Shepherds burn their whole flocks before retreating down the hillside. The whole atmosphere is one of a dying village, where everyone is leaving or has suffered some loss.

Those villagers still clinging on were like ticks on a dead dog, as Yelena’s father used to say. Yelena knew she was the same. She was embedded here too, stuck so deeply in her birthplace that it was taking accusations of dark sorcery to uproot her for a second time.

The rot affects everything it touches, but has fatal effects on both people and animals. It has become a repeating nightmare for the main secondary character, Velna, who her own POV.

Velna flailed, trying to regain her balance as a ragged shape swooped down from the branches above her, broken and oozing, gleaming eyes shining in the dark and bulging like mushroom caps.

She had a moment of numb clarity where she realised it was an owl, a rotted, crazed thing, spores floating around its wings, its fibrous pinions a mesh of wormy roots. Its tumescent little heart was partly exposed and pumping fit to burst as its body fell apart.

This is a small example of what is behind my comparison with T. Kingfisher’s What Moves the Dead, along with the decaying atmosphere of the Gothic castle, and the fantasy setting.

The Dead Gods & Religious Horror

I drew most of my inspiration for the ‘dead gods’ from The Epic of Gilgamesh. In that story, the gods destroy the world by a flood because they were sick of their creations’ prayers. I thought about having a very similar mythic history for the Decadian religion’s origin myths, but darker.

“Yes, one moment, it’s… let me translate, I’m a little rusty.” Yelen paused. “Very well. This talks about the dead gods. You know this story, yes? The dead gods accidentally created the Sacred Ten from the aftermath of their atrocities…”

Yelena didn’t like these stories. She liked the murals and carvings in the hostelry that celebrated the fall of the dead gods, but tales of their actual reign made her feel sick, their world too chaotic and dark to even imagine.

She tried to move him on. “How does the rot come in?”

“Wait, wait. I have it. Let me read it properly. Once, over the sun, past the moon, the gods fought a terrible battle, and from their dead oozed a terrible curse, the raw substance of all curses. It crept out from the realm of the gods and into the world when it was still new, and threatened everything. Page, please.”

 Yelena turned the page, trying not to wince at the texture of it under her fingers. The book felt greasy; unclean.

The ‘dead gods’ are the previous pantheon, all slain in a cosmic battle (the first end of the world). They, like the gods in the Babylonian epic, hated the prayers of the mortals they had made. They sealed themselves off from their creation in a private realm. However, as they had made humankind from parts of themselves, they were bound to their creations by bonds of obligation and responsibility. They couldn’t shut the prayers out completely, only make it harder for the prayers to reach them.

Prayers could reach the gods only if a person acted as a conduit. They achieved this by reaching a state of total, blank-minded oblivion. In that moment of nothing, the prayers of others could be conducted through them, like a channel. The conduit-person could not pray themselves in this state, as any conscious thought on their part closed the channel.

At first, the gods were annoyed when people figured this out. They spitefully granted every prayer that came to them in this way, regardless of the consequences.

Inevitably, they started to find this amusing. They answered most prayers in odd, perverse ways, but they also granted ‘high-profile’ prayers as requested. This only encouraged more prayer requests for their entertainment.

As people realised you only had to pray to receive your heart’s desire, the demand for conduits increased. Temples of disciplined ascetics were in high demand. Some monks became catatonic and were eaten by sores because nobody would disturb them. Pleasure temples where the priestly duties included achieving this blank-minded state through orgasm also got disturbingly out of hand. Inflicting extreme pain or fear also effectively turned some sensitive souls into blank-minded conduits; consequently, warlords often embarked on “prayer raids” with professional torturers.

There were “prayer riots” where desperate people stormed temples to either access conduits for themselves, or to massacre them and prevent them falling into enemy hands/in retaliation for some atrocity the gods caused by answering prayer in a particularly perverse way.

After 10 separate near-apocalyptic atrocities caused by answered prayer, a new being was accidentally formed. Each one emerged from the lingering remnants of the gods’ power. This being was a child of the gods, in a sense, but was fully formed as an ageless adult. (Think Athena springing from Zeus).

The Sacred Ten / the Decad hated their creators, the gods, when they saw what the world had become. They also blamed the people themselves, and decided to wipe out humankind and start over. Each of the Sacred Ten picked a human to save, and these 10 survivors helped to shape the new world.

After destroying the living world, the Decad left it to the 10 survivors, went to fight the gods in their private realm, and slew them all. They then sealed up that realm with their own flesh. Each cut off a portion of themselves for the seal, but unfortunately, the Sacred Eighth had sustained so many wounds that —y couldn’t give enough of —-r flesh for their full share. A tiny crack remained. Through that crack, the ghosts of the dead gods escaped to haunt the living world as spirits, and their rotting corpses oozed out into the new world as the essence of all curses.

This myth is a prehistoric cosmological legend, but it features heavily as we learn more about what the rot is, where it comes from, and how to stop it.

In terms of timeline, this myth is the equivalent of being antediluvian, while Yelen & Yelena itself takes place in roughly the fantasy equivalent of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, perhaps early 1800s. So by now it’s a religious myth, and wild magic has been tamed (it’s now a power source, the equivalent of gas or electricity), and curses no longer really exist except in stories.

Or do they…?

Nightmares

Dreams come out of the Dream Gates. Burning a prayer bag of sweet herbs keeps the nightmare gate closed, so they say… but if you have terrible nightmares, they may or may not be your own bad memories.

Velna fell asleep in the strange bed, Yelena beside her, and dreamed the owl from the forest was outside the window.

The shutters were open, although the curtains were drawn across the glass. Its shape appeared behind the thin cloth – too thin for the winter, Velna thought, these curtains were meant for summer – like a severed head.

Velna got out of bed, gliding over to the window as if compelled. She didn’t want to pull the curtains back, because she knew what she would see.

In the dream, her hands were ghostly pale, as if she were already dead.

If I’m dead, what does it matter?

She nearly twitched the cloth aside, but a movement in her peripheral vision distracted her. The bed she had left was not a bed at all.

Yelena was lying on a stone table altar, carved like a bed, embedded with iron nails. She was bleeding, punctured, a priestess in ancient blood-soaked silks. She bucked and arched on her spiked altar, pleasuring herself with her legs open and hand skilfully engaged.

“This is for you,” Yelena said, turning her head to Velna, dots of fresh blood pockmarking her flushed cheeks. “I’m doing this for you. Pray.”

Velna could see the moment her friend’s mind went blank with pleasure, the way that perfect nothingness split her skull with a shaft of divine light, and Yelena became a vessel, an open channel for Velna’s prayers.

I want to see Kella again, Velna prayed swiftly, while the gods could hear her.

The dead gods.

It felt wrong, blasphemous, but she couldn’t help herself.

Both Yelena and Velna have ‘dead god’ nightmares and rot-related nightmares, but whose memories are they? Or are they just the fancies of the dreaming mind?

Only time will tell…

Possession Horror

The final act contains scenes of possession horror from the POV of the possessed. This is the extreme literal expression of the themes of agency and autonomy throughout the book.

[—-] stared through her unblinking eyes and couldn’t move them, trapped within the marionette her body had become. Her whole existence was a silent scream.

I want to keep this more or less spoiler free, so I can’t say too much here. These scenes explore what it is like to be stuck inside your body while someone else pilots it for their own evil ends.

I did want it to have a HEA of a sort, so the possession has a resolution that restores autonomy, but be warned, this is also pretty grim.

I hope that the ending is ultimately a triumphant one, though, so I wouldn’t class this novel as “grimdark”. I think there is enough warmth and playfulness to lift the tone throughout… I certainly wouldn’t say the tone is as wry and playful as A Botanical Daughter by Noah Medlock, but I hope at least some of the banter is funny!

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Advance Reader Copies are available until 31st January 2025, if you just can’t wait for the properly formatted final edit copy release in eBook and paperback!

I will be publishing wide distribution for both eBook and paperback. Note that Amazon’s costs are much lower than Draft2Digital, so paperbacks via bookshop.org, B&N etc will be more expensive in order for me to make the same royalty amount per book (about £1.20). For Amazon, to make just over £1.00 in royalties I have to price the book at £10.99. For D2D, I have to price it at £12.99 to make that same amount.

Note also that it’s slightly more expensive to get author copies via D2D as well, so while I personally want to move away from Amazon, I recognise that realistically they are still the only affordable option for many indie authors for proof copies and bulk orders.

This novel will also be available in audio format via my podcast. It will run as a weekly serial following its eBook and paperback release, and I’ll have some fun bonus episodes for you this season too!

Don’t worry – we’ll go back to Pagham-on-Sea as well. I’ll also be giving you the audio for The Reluctant Husband as a bonus extended episode or mini-series on the end of S04, just like you got The Sussex Fretsaw Massacre as a 3-parter on the end of S03!