Born in the Wrong Reading/Writing Era – Gothic Book Challenge
Though I like to dabble in different genres, any one who is really familiar with me knows that my true reading passion is Gothic horror. Give me a female lead in a dark castle or mysterious manor, throw in some spooky happenings with an intricate plot and maybe a love interest, and I’m right where I want to be. This is not only true in reading, but in writing as well. Unfortunately, even though that’s true, I’ve never read too many of this sort of book!
I don’t know when I decided that I even liked this sort of thing. I can’t think of a book that drew me in, even though I grew up reading horror books, but before I knew it, I was writing Gothic horror myself – before I was aware of what label to put on it! My explanation for writing has always been, ‘I write what I want to read’. Truth be told, I’m always on the lookout for Gothic stories (aside from vampires, please) but when I go hunting for books online and type in ‘Gothic’ nothing much comes up. I’ve tried to look up online lists for this sort of book, and while I did find out that this genre was most popular in the late 60s/early 70s, I couldn’t find any that were still in print.
Since I didn’t have any specific titles, I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for. I was lucky enough to unearth Angela Carter (The Magic Toyshop) and Shirley Jackson (We Have Always Lived in the Castle), but other than that, I was left searching for what I wanted in more recent books, and that was rare.
Not long ago, I was hunting for book lots on ebay and it suddenly occurred to me that I should just hammer in ‘Gothic book lot’ and see what came up. I actually got 2 really good hits for large lots of books, and they all looked like just what I’d love to read!
I was fortunate enough to snag a Lot of these books on ebay: 27 of them, to be exact.
(Just look at these books, and tell me they don’t look like me!)
Many of these books are not even on Goodreads or Wikipedia, and if they are, they have very few ratings, if any. It’s kind of a shame to me, and so in an effort to bring some attention back to this genre (since it is one I love to write in myself and will continue to) I’m going to periodically read and review these on the blog for the sake of helping bring out what I love and share some of these more obscure texts with others.
It’s not quite Nevermor related but it does have some relevance to me as a writer, to my other works, and will be something a little extra for the blog. 
