The Gothic Romance: Mystique & Mystery

Mystique

I have been looking into the origins of the Gothic Romance girl-meets-house-type cover illustration. I didn't think there were any covers of that type in the original run of Weird Tales (1923-1954), but I looked anyway. The closest thing I found is Margaret Brundage's cover from May 1943 illustrating "John Cawder's Wife" by P. Schuyler Miller.* That cover, shown below, illustrates a convention of the Gothic Romance, namely the gallery of family portraits. I didn't find any of the girl-meets-house-type cover. I think that type was a convention that started later, possibly around 1960. One of the problems in this search is that a lot of Gothic Romance paperback book covers posted on the Internet lack dates of publication.

In thinking more about all of this, I wondered about the timing of things. If the Gothic revival or the increased popularity of the Gothic Romance began in about 1960, well, what else happened then, specifically, what happened regarding women? Why were fictional young women of the 1960s running from houses? And if they were running from houses, what did those houses represent? One possibility is that the Gothic Romance became popular at around the same time that second-wave feminism began, and that women were running from houses so as to escape from the traditional roles of wife, mother, and homemaker. Remember that there usually isn't the figure of a villain or antagonist in the girl-meets-house-type illustration. The house itself appears to be the villain. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan was based on surveys conducted in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was published in late 1963. Chapter 1 closes with these words:

We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: "I want something more than my husband and my children and my home." [Emphasis added.]

Another possibility in all of this is that young women were simultaneously drawn to and afraid of or apprehensive about taking on traditional roles. They were conflicted. They may have wanted those roles at some level, but there was fear nonetheless. Maybe their fear was expressed in an outward way: they were afraid of the past and tradition, fearful for their own futures, but they turned their fears outward, towards the house and what might happen there, versus inward, where they might cause psychic damage. That sounds like a Freudian interpretation. I'm not sure how accurate it might be. In any case, an outward conflict is more dramatic, is more easily turned into fiction, and provides for the possibility of a final, satisfying, and concrete resolution. Inward conflicts--woman against herself--are murkier. They may exist only in the abstract, and they may not be resolved fully, finally, satisfactorily, or at all.**

I think of the romance as a conservative genre, for it is about the past. But maybe there is actually a spectrum of romances, with some romances being conservative, if not reactionary, and others being less so. Alternatively, "on a spectrum," may not be the right way to look at it at all. Spectra, after all, are linear. "Weblike," "diffuse," "oceanic," or something similar might be a better expression, and it might better describe the feelings and the state of mind of the romantic heroine caught in her story. I should point out here that many Gothic Romances were written by men using feminine pseudonyms. I'm not sure that was really appropriate, except for possibly in the case of "Marilyn Ross"--Canadian author Dan Ross (1912-1995)--who wrote the Dark Shadows paperbacks. Remember that Dark Shadows was a television series, meaning, it was linear and moved in sequence, even if its storylines were sometimes in webs. I once read a Gothic Romance written by a man writing as a woman who did not have the reading needs of women in mind when he wrote. I have to tell you, it wasn't a very pleasant book nor a pleasant reading experience. Romances are probably better left to women writers, although I would not rule out a romance about a man, written by a man, and written from a man's point of view. Notice that men's names--Barnabas Collins, Quentin Collins--are in the titles of most of the Dark Shadows paperbacks. The show and the paperbacks began with Victoria Winters, but she soon faded.

So maybe the Gothic Romance really is an expression of the young woman's desire to be free from the past and traditional roles by her running from the house and everything that it represents regarding marriage and family. Sadly, the freedom that women have gained in the real world since the 1960s has not resulted in greater happiness, at least according to various studies (which should always be taken with a grain of salt, for people are real and individual, and are not statistics, data points, or data sets). Here, for example, is the first sentence of an abstract from 2009:

The lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years by many objective measures, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. 

Citation: Stevenson, Betsey, and Justin Wolfers. 2009. "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness." American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 1 (2): 190–225.

Of course young women in the period 1960 or 1963 to 1974-1975 could not have known that would happen, if that is indeed what happened*** I'll close this part of today's entry by saying that I don't know very much about Gothic Romances (I would like to find out more) and that what I have written here is mostly speculation, or the proposal of a hypothesis. What this discussion needs is more reading, thinking, research, and discussion. More than anything, it needs the opinions and input of women readers.

Mystery

Another possible source for the girl-meets-house type cover illustration has occurred to me, and that is the Nancy Drew books of the 1930s through the 1950s. I haven't found just the right illustration, but there are plenty of Gothic elements on those covers, such as the hidden staircase and the crumbling wall. One difference is that Nancy Drew always goes towards the house, whereas the Gothic-Romantic heroine usually runs away from it, or faces it with fear or apprehension. But then Nancy Drew, as a girl detective and of pre-marriage age, is not acting out a traditional role, and so there is nothing for her to run from and nothing to fear. The solution to the mystery lies within the house, and that's where she eagerly goes.

-----

Notes

*P. Schuyler Miller died in 1974 at the site of an old mansion. The date and type of place are coincident with the subjects of today's entry.

**Maybe the Gothic Romance is the woman's version of the man's adventure story, i.e., a woman's adventure, an outward conflict, and her ultimate test. In all of this there is a distinct resolution. The opposite genre, that of the static and forever-unresolved inner conflict, might be the possibly non-existent Girl-Meets-Therapist story or something similar. Here I'm reminded of Iris Owens' novel After Claude (1973), which is very funny but ultimately very sad. I'm also reminded of Looking for Mr. Goodbar by Judith Rossner (1975). These may be examples of the anti-romance: the romance that has gone horribly awry, or stories of women's lives breaking down and flying into pieces, or of lives and romances never getting started at all. Note the dates of publication. If there is a flip side to these two novels, it might be Fear of Flying by Erica Jong (1973), which is also very funny but doesn't end so sadly. The heroine survives and is intact. She goes on living past her crisis. I should add that 1973 was the year in which abortion became legalized in the United States. The Gothic Romance may have run its course in the period 1960 to 1974-1975, but legalized abortion may have provided a real-world way out for the fictional heroine caught in her life's dilemma, and for her readers, admirers, and followers. If the Gothic Romance faded in the mid seventies, after abortion was legalized, was that just a coincidence? Or was it a culturally or historically significant development?

***Nineteen sixty is my approximate beginning year for what I have called the Gothic revival, while 1963 is the publication date of The Feminine Mystique. Nineteen seventy-four would have been the beginning year of the 35-year period referenced in the study in American Economic Journal, while 1974-1975 is a possible end period, or close to it, of the Gothic revival of the 1960s and '70s. Gothic Romances continued to be published after that. I guess they're still being published now, but that might just be another case of our picking through the ruins of a previous greater civilization.

We'll never again have what we had before. One reason is that mass market paperbacks are no longer being printed, or at least distributed in America. What a disaster. Another is that cover art is so absolutely terrible now. If it isn't already being made by AI, it soon will be, and the prose will follow. Or, any reader can prompt an AI to "write" a Gothic Romance for her, and she can even customize it to include herself as its heroine, with all of her own imperfections removed (such as a slight limp, such as in Looking for Mr. Goodbar). Readers will no longer have to go looking for their fantasies. They will simply make their own. They will in the process no longer be in touch with or have to be in touch with other minds and other lives. Fiction will become completely solipsistic. (Robert A. Heinlein was, in his fiction, prescient.) There will no longer be bestseller lists because every book will sell exactly one print-on-demand copy, and that will be for its "author." If people even talk to each other anymore, everyone will say to everyone else, "Why would I read your book when I have my own?" The parallel in men's adventure has already been reached: men no longer read, but they can live out their fantasies in computer games or video games involving lots of shooting, car chases, and so on. That living out of fantasies for men is a moment-by-moment interactive story of physical adventure. The equivalent video game for women might involve a moment-by-moment interactive romance, or a story of relationships, which would be a lot harder for a computer system or AI to carry out. And how satisfying could that possibly be for the female consumer/fantasist?

Further notes on years and ages:

First, a woman who was twenty years old in 1960 would have turned thirty-five in 1975, thus she would have gone from her very young adulthood to the cusp of middle age in that period. If reading goes in cycles, then maybe the Gothic revival or the popularity of the Gothic Romance was just following the law of cycles. There are lots of "ifs" in all of that.

Second, thirty-five years is half the allotted threescore-and-ten of a person's life. I can't say whether there is any significance in that. However, by the time she turns thirty-five, the symbolic conflict in the Gothic Romance would have been resolved in a woman's life. More "ifs." Parallels in a man's life as he ages from his early twenties into his mid thirties might involve sports, combat, or other kinds of outward conflict or adventure. If he hasn't done the things he once dreamed of by age thirty-five, he will probably never do them. He might experience a loss at that point. It might cause him grief equivalent to a woman's grief. One more thing: a pregnancy at age thirty-five or after is considered a geriatric pregnancy. Don't yell at me. That's how medicine sees it.

Third, if Jane Smiley was right in her novella "The Age of Grief" (1987), then the thirties are the age of grief and a time when people's lives change from youth into age. The concerns of the young Gothic-Romantic heroine no longer apply at that age, although part of the plot of "The Age of Grief" involves a woman's running away from her husband, family, and home to be with her unseen and unnamed lover. In the same year that "The Age of Grief" was published, a TV show called Thirtysomething made its debut. The largest cohort in American history turned thirty years old in 1987. Nineteen forty-seven was also a peak birth year. The large cohort born in 1947 would have aged out of their thirties during the first season of Thirtysomething.

Fourth, a baby born in 1974 would have turned thirty-five in 2009 when Ms. Stevenson's and Mr. Wolfers' study was published, a study in which the authors recorded a decline in women's happiness during that period. In other words, the statistical baby born in the mid 1970s had a decreasing statistical chance at statistical happiness as she aged. Of course people and happiness are not statistics, and statistics are not fate or doom. Happy people are happy and unhappy people are unhappy, regardless of year, age, or circumstance.

Fifth, now, seventeen-and-a-half years later, or one-fourth of our allotted threescore-and-ten, very large numbers of Americans, women more than men, are taking drugs for anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses. I don't think those large numbers are necessarily an indication of greater unhappiness, for the theory and culture of drugs has become all-pervasive. Everybody is taking more drugs for everything now. Our country has become awash in drugs. People are gobbling them up as if they were candy and every day were Easter or Halloween. But if taking drugs is a sign of greater unhappiness, including among women, then what has all of the change and the agitation for change really done to make people's lives better? Could it be nothing?

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Machines for Living, Haunts of the Dead-Part Four

"The past is never dead. It's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity."

--From Requiem for a Nun by William Faulkner (1951)

A lot of things happened all at once, or pretty close to each other, and I don't know how to puzzle it all out. Weird Tales came to an end in 1954 after thirty-one years in print. It was already a digest-sized magazine by then, and it didn't reappear until almost twenty years later. Even then it was only for four flawed issues. The institution of the Comics Code meant the end of horror comics in the mid 1950s. The Golden Age of Science Fiction is supposed to have ended before that, in 1950. What followed was a period of softer science fiction, or what some people wanted to call speculative fiction. Then, in the 1960s, New Wave science fiction and Dangerous Visions-type fiction became popular, if not dominant, in the field. Most pulp magazines, including science fiction magazines, either came to an end or switched to another format (i.e., not the pulp format) in the late 1950s. At around the same time there was a revival of monsters in popular culture. I think that had to do with nostalgia for the 1930s and early '40s. I'm pretty sure there was a commercial angle to all of it, too. The television horror host came along at the same time. He or she had previously been on radio and in comic books.

There was a lot of TV-watching in the 1950s, but that doesn't mean people gave up on reading. Men's adventure magazines became popular then. The readers of those magazines must have included a lot of veterans from World War II and the Korean War. Even if they hadn't been at war, an awful lot of American men had been drafted and had served in the military. There was almost a built-in readership for magazines of this type. Paperback adventure series novels also became really popular. These were as good as the James Bond novels of Ian Fleming and as poor as I don't know what. (Even some of the James Bond novels aren't that great.) Weird fiction, horror, and fantasy had to go somewhere once pulp magazines came to an end. There were digest-sized magazines in those genres during the 1960s and early '70s, but they also went into paperback publication. I think of mass market paperbacks of the 1950s and '60s as simply a continuation of pulp magazines and the pulp genres, only in a different format.

I'm sure there were women who read men's adventure magazines in the 1950s and '60s. There were, after all, some pretty strong and tough women in those days, and I'm happy to have known some of them. They weren't weak and afraid. They weren't shrinking violets. Nonetheless, the female readership of men's adventure magazines and paperbacks couldn't have been very great. There doesn't seem to have been much for women in the science fiction of the Golden Age and after, at least until the 1970s when women's science fiction became more of a thing. Maybe there was more for women in the more backward-looking genres. However, Weird Tales, which was always popular with women, was gone by the mid 1950s. That wouldn't have left much in genre fiction for women except for the romance, specifically the recently arrived or aborning Gothic Romance. In short, men had their type of reading, the extremes of which (not counting pornography) appear to have been in men's adventure magazines, and women had theirs, the extremes of which appear to have been in the form of the Gothic Romance.

Like I've said, I don't know when the Gothic revival began, specifically the girl-meets-house type Gothic Romance. I have looked at some covers of love and romance magazines and comic books of the 1950s. They are pretty rosy and sunny and wholesome, even when they are about unhappy things. There isn't any dark or Gothic imagery. But then something changed. I have wondered if the vast popularity of Peyton Place by Grace Metalious (1956) had anything to do with that. It is after all a book written for women that includes some Gothic elements. It even has an abandoned castle, although nothing happens there. I'm pretty sure that the paperback Gothic Romance was common and recognizable by the early to mid 1960s. (A fairly recent published history of that genre by Lori A. Paige has a beginning date of 1960.) I don't think Dark Shadows was a leader. I think it more likely that Dark Shadows was following a trend when it made its debut in 1966. I'll point out that near the end of Peyton Place, a young woman travels by train to a New England town (she's returning home), just as Victoria Winters travels by train to Collinsport.

So there were science fiction paperbacks and magazines; men's adventure paperbacks and magazines; and weird fiction, horror, and fantasy paperbacks and magazines, but was there ever a Gothic Romance magazine to go along with the Gothic Romance paperback? I asked myself that question before I looked. Then I looked and found out that the answer is yes, but not much of a yes. Two titles came up right away in my search, Gothic Romances, published in three issues by Dell in 1970-1971; and Gothic Tales of Love, published by the same group that published Marvel Comics (the editor of the magazine was Stan Lee) in at least three issues in or about 1975. There was a second magazine entitled Gothic Romances. That one was put out by Seaboard Periodicals, which also published Atlas Comics. If the second Gothic Romances magazine was like the Atlas comic book titles, it couldn't have lasted long. The first (and only?) issue came out in December 1974.

There were Gothic Romance comic books, too, including Charlton Comics' Haunted Love (1973-1975) and DC Comics' Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion (1971-1974) and The Sinister House of Secret Love/Secrets of Sinister House (1972-1974). Before that, Gold Key had begun publishing a comic book version of Dark Shadows. That series lasted for thirty-five issues, from 1968 to 1976. DC Comics had other Gothic titles. These weren't specifically romances, but there were more than a few with girl-meets-house-type content. Titles included The House of Mystery (beginning with issue #175 in 1968), The House of Secrets (beginning with issue #81 in 1969), and The Unexpected (beginning with issue #105 in 1968).

So it looks like the Gothic revival reached its peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but maybe by then it was already in decline. Those few, short-lived Gothic Romance magazines may have been a final flourish, or a swan song. The three Gothic Romance comic books mentioned above came to an end at the same time, in 1974-1975. Gothic Romance paperbacks continued, though, and I think there are still some being published today. But then our current culture is mostly about mining the culture of the past. So many things now seem so tired. Anyway, that still doesn't answer when the revival began, or what was the first girl-meets-house-type Gothic Romance paperback. The romance is looked down upon, even by aficionados of popular culture. We have an Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Why not an Internet Romance or Gothic Romance Fiction Database? And why not an Internet Western Fiction Database to go with it? Maybe then we would have answers to some of these questions.

I'll close by pointing out that of the seven comic book titles listed above, four have the word house or mansion in their titles. For whatever reason, the Gothic story is tied to the house. That may just be a cliché. If it is, we shouldn't put too much stock in it. I would add that weird fiction and horror stories are also very often tied to the house, in other words, a place where there isn't any movement through space and may not be any movement through time, unless it is backwards in time. Either that or the past--including people from the past--moves through time by coming forward and intruding upon the present.* Science fiction and non-genre fiction or realistic fiction are not so tied to an unmoving place. Earlier this summer, I wrote about automobiles and rocketships. Both move. Neither is fixed in space. And if both can act as time machines, then they are also not fixed in time. Both allow an escape into the future and away from the past. Maybe that gets to the possibility that science fiction and novelistic fiction are characterized by movement--forward movement--while weird fiction, horror, and the Gothic Romance are static and unmoving, or they are retrogressive. The house, fixed in space and not having come forward in time, is the locus of plot, character, and conflict. It outlasts its inhabitants, which may very well reenact, over and over again, all of the dramas of the past. In short, in weird fiction, horror fiction, and the Gothic Romance, the house is a house not of the future but of the past. It becomes not a machine for living but the haunt of the dead.

-----

*How many Gothic stories are there in which the characters are basically stuck in a house? We ask ourselves, "Why don't they just leave?" But they don't or can't. (Instead they go hide behind the chainsaws.) That could be by convention, or it could be because they are physically trapped in the house, which may also be a convention. But what if they are not physically trapped so much as psychologically, emotionally, or even existentially trapped? In order to escape, they would have to outgrow decades or centuries of their own familial or cultural past. How is that possible in a single lifetime, let alone in a single episode from that lifetime? And if they are so trapped, what significance does that have for the rest of us? Is the past, and are the people of the past, especially the family, inescapable?

The Sinister House of Secret Love #4 (May 1971), with cover art by Tony DeZuniga. Again, there is the lit upper window and the fleeing woman as in so many illustrations for the Gothic Romance, but here a male figure, emerging from the house, takes the place of the house as the threat or the menace. The blurb lets us know, as if we didn't know already, that this is a tale of "Gothic Terror." And if you think this looks like the cover of a Gothic Romance paperback, you should have a look at the covers of the first three issues of this title.

Proof that the look of the Gothic Romance paperback made its way into superhero comic books: Batman #227 (Dec. 1970), with art by Neal Adams. This is a recreation of Bob Kane's cover of Detective Comics #31 from December 1939. The original cover was Gothic enough. Neal Adams Gothicized it (my new word) even more. In fact, he gave it the Gothic Romance treatment by including an old house with a single lit upper window and a young woman fleeing from it in our direction. The late Mr. Adams added two components, a villain and a hero. In the typical Gothic Romance paperback cover, the house seems to be the villain, and there isn't any hero. The heroine must save herself from the house of the past, haunted by the people of the past. But here, Batman looms over the landscape and its running figures. He is sure to intervene. And in case you were unaware of the Gothic content, there is the title blurb: "The Demon of Gothos Mansion!"

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Machines for Living, Haunts of the Dead-Part Three

Like I said last time, I don't know when what I have called the Gothic revival began, but in the 1960s there were Hammer films from England and horror films and gialli from Italy. In 1966, Dark Shadows, a Gothic soap opera, made its debut. Many Gothic revival stories consist of two main elements, a girl and a house. A commenter on this blog called the Gothic Romance a story of girl meets house. Dark Shadows begins that way, with Victoria Winters being the girl and Collinwood the house. (She is engaged in a Gothic quest, which is a search for origins.) These houses are Gothic in that they are old, dark, gloomy, isolated, and seemingly abandoned or barely inhabited. There are secret and mysterious family histories and curses, galleries of family portraits, secret passageways and stairways, secret or sealed rooms, long, dark hallways, deep, dark cellars, high towers and turrets, and so on. If you go there, be sure to take with you a flashlight and plenty of batteries because the candles are sure to be blown out by a sudden draft.

The original Gothic Romances of the 1700s have Scooby-Doo-type endings in which all of their seemingly weird and supernatural events have naturalistic explanations. That wasn't always true with the Gothic revival. For example, in Dark Shadows, there are vampires, ghosts, werewolves, witches, and even time travel. There are plenty of those things in Hammer films and Italian horror films, too. I guess the Gothic revival combined the original Gothic Romance with tales of supernatural horror and weird fiction.

Dark Shadows came to an end in 1971. By then there had come along a revival of Regency-style fashions, with long, loose dresses, tighter busts, high waists, and dipping necklines. Women put their hair up, in contrast to the natural look of the late 1960s. You can still see the Regency look on TV shows from the early 1970s, such as Night Gallery (1970-1973), which was the Gothic counterpart to the more science-fictional Twilight Zone (1959-1964). Suzanne Pleshette often wore the look in early episodes of the The Bob Newhart Show. There were of course Regency-style fashions in Dark Shadows, too.

I don't know what connection there might have been between the Gothic revival and the return of Regency-style fashions, but some of the original Gothic Romances were published during the original Regency era, including Lady Caroline Lamb's Glenarvon (1816), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and Jane Austen's comic Northanger Abbey (1818). I think Regency-style fashion and of course the Gothic Romance came both before and after the official dates of the British Regency, 1811 to 1820. The Regency era is supposed to have spanned from the 1790s to 1837 and to have ended with the accession of Queen Victoria. After that it was nearly sixty-four years of a different kind of culture that bore her name. Even so, Gothic fiction continued to be written, published, and read by an eager public.

To be concluded . . .

Mansion of Golden Windows (1966) by Elsie Lee (1912-1987), with a typical girl-meets-house cover. In this case the girl looks like Joan Collins. Notice the single lit upper window. It is one of the conventions of Gothic illustration. I don't know the name of the artist.

Text and caption copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Machines for Living, Haunts of the Dead-Part Two

In the early twentieth century, during the Machine Age, the house became "a machine for living." That was how Le Corbusier saw it anyway. There were machine-like designs for houses and other buildings during the 1920s and '30s. I think that's what fictional architect Quintus Teal means when he brings up the modernistic "Service Station School" in Robert A. Heinlein's short story "'--And He Built a Crooked House--'", originally in Astounding Science-Fiction in February 1941.

The house as a literal machine for living became a popular idea after World War II when people thought that science was going to solve all of our problems. I won't make a distinction here between the house as a machine for living, the house of the future, and the house of tomorrow. All were based on ideas about science and progress that began in the early 1900s and continued into the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. Inasmuch as science fiction is the literature of progress and science, that genre contributed to the development, as concepts, of the machine-house, the automated house, the robot-house, the house of tomorrow, and the house of the future. There were houses of the future at the 1939 World's Fair in New York, and, if I understand things correctly, the 1962 World's Fair in Seattle and the 1964 World's Fair, again in New York. The future was in the air at all three fairs, but it was during the 1939 World's Fair that the first World Science Fiction Convention was held. The convention-goers also went to the fair. They probably saw the house in which they might have imagined they would one day live.

Warner Brothers made at least one animated cartoon about the house of the future. Entitled House Hunting Mice, it was directed by Chuck Jones and released in 1947. Tex Avery followed suit with a cartoon called The House of Tomorrow, released in 1949. Ray Bradbury wrote a short story, "There Will Come Soft Rains," in which the house of the future goes about its work even after its inhabitants have all been killed off in a nuclear war. The late Mr. Bradbury's story was published in the May 6, 1950, issue of Collier's magazine. It also appeared as a chapter in his novelized collection of short stories, The Martian Chronicles, also published in May 1950. In the book version, "There Will Come Soft Rains" begins on August 4, 2026, a date that has just passed. I wish I had remembered the date. If I had, I would have written something here in observance of it.

Wally Wood drew a comic book adaptation of "There Will Come Soft Rains" for Weird Fantasy #17, published in January/February 1953 by EC Comics. (Illustration below.) The house of the future, complete with a robot maid named Rosie, reappeared in the animated TV series The Jetsons, originally broadcast in 1962-1963. Now I learn that the architectural style shown in The Jetsons has a name. It's called the Googie style. The first Googie-style building was designed in the 1940s by architect John Lautner (1911-1994). It was a popular look in the 1960s and '70s. I seem to remember that Howard Johnson's had restaurants built in that style. I remember seeing Googie-style signs for shopping centers and bowling alleys, too, even into the 1990s. You can still sometimes see signs and buildings in this style, but I think they're mostly gone now. What a shame.

The machine-house or the house of the future was in art and in the real world from as early as the 1920s to as late as the 1960s and '70s. But the "future" of real life couldn't quite keep up with the future of the imagination: despite all of the hopes and promises of the past, the house of the future has never really arrived. Several years ago, I read that the last major household appliance that was developed was the microwave oven. That was in the 1960s. There have been refinements to that and other appliances since then. There are even house-of-the-future-type vacuum cleaners in existence now. Yesterday (August 23, 2026), I saw a robot lawnmower going about its boustrophedon work. (I hope it wasn't being paid for the subpar job it was doing.) But there aren't any of the houses of the future, and the house has not become a machine for living. If it is anything other than a house, the twenty-first American house is actually an investment. Don't live in your house too hard, and definitely don't personalize it in any way. That might damage its resale value.

Concurrent with the mid-to-late house of the future--i.e., the house of the 1950s to the 1970s--there was another kind of house that became more prominent in our culture. This one was far older, and it was the kind of house against which the architects of the futuristic house were rebelling. This was of course the Gothic house, or the house of the past. Gothic fiction or the Gothic Romance goes back to the 1700s, but in the 1960s and '70s, there was a kind of Gothic revival in popular culture. I have never read a history or chronology of this Gothic revival. (That's my own name for it. I wonder if there is another.) I don't know when it began. The immediate origins of it may have been in Universal monster movies and the original Weird Tales magazine of the 1920s to the 1940s. Monsters had their own revival in the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially on television. In the early to mid part of the century, there was of course Southern Gothic fiction, but there was also an Eastern or New England Gothic. Shirley Jackson (1916-1965), who lived in New York and Vermont, was an exemplar. She wrote The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), among other works. As I wrote not long ago, Peyton Place (1956) by Grace Metalious (1924-1964) also has Gothic elements and may be considered a Gothic fiction. The Peyton Place of the title is an abandoned castle. Tom Tryon (1926-1991) was another New Englander who wrote Gothic fiction about his native region. He had a book called Harvest Home (1973), but that title refers to a festival, not a place. Stephen King (b. 1947) is a current practitioner of New England Gothic. His second novel, 'Salem's Lot (1975), is about an old house called the Marsten House. These fictional houses can be counted among the houses of the past.

To be continued . . . 

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Machines for Living, Haunts of the Dead-Part One

A long time ago I watched the movie The Fountainhead (1949), starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal. The screenplay by Ayn Rand was based on her novel of the same name, published in 1943. It's kind of a ridiculous movie, mostly to do with the plot and the dialogue. Real people do not talk like the characters in this movie, in which every extended piece of dialogue becomes a speech of great weight and seriousness--a manifesto, a valediction, or some other kind of heavy, even bombastic, address. The acquittal near the end of the architect Howard Roark, played by Gary Cooper, is completely unbelievable. It carries the movie away into the territory of a bizarre Randian fantasy. Today I read that Barbara Stanwyck wanted the role of Dominique Francon for herself. If she had been cast in that role, The Fountainhead would have been a better movie. I'm certain of that, for Barbara Stanwyck is always worth watching. The plot and the dialogue wouldn't have been any better, though, because Ayn Rand was by accounts uncompromising in those respects. The movie had to be made by her design.

There is something about The Fountainhead that has never quite worked for me. It seems incongruous. What I'm talking about is an apparent inconsistency between the supposed conservatism of the screenwriter and the evident progressivism of her artist-hero. Roark was not intended to be a progressive-type hero. He is supposed to be an individualist against a prevailing and powerful collectivism and conformism. And yet he is determined and uncompromising (like his author and creator) in his modernistic rejection of older and traditional forms, including Gothic forms. He even goes so far as to blow up a housing development that is being constructed contrary to his design. He wants to strip his buildings of all ornament, to build them in effect on the model of Le Corbusier, the German Bauhaus, and other modernist European architects. If I understand Ayn Rand and her philosophy correctly, she could not have sympathized with European modernism in architecture. And in fact she didn't, according to quotations from her in Wikipedia, taken from an essay by Donald Leslie Johnson, published in 2005. I guess the blame for the European-modernist designs of Howard Roark was laid on production designer Edward Carrere. Ayn Rand's original model was Frank Lloyd Wright, who was neither a traditionalist nor a European-modernist. If his style of architecture had made it into The Fountainhead, I don't think there would have been an incongruity. The movie would still be kind of ridiculous, though.

A teller of weird tales referred to European modernism in a story of the 1940s. He was Robert A. Heinlein and it was "'--And He Built a Crooked House--'", which was published in Astounding Science-Fiction in February 1941. (Illustration by Hubert Rogers below.) Heinlein's story is about architecture and four dimensions of space. (It also mentions himself, to whom the author refers as "the Hermit.") I would hazard it was the first place most people who ever heard of the tesseract or hypercube actually read about that crazy shape. Heinlein's fictional architect, Quintus Teal (five is an odd number, a teal is a duck, so "Odd Duck"?), mentions Frank Lloyd Wright and "the Moderns," i.e., modernist architects. He even quotes (or paraphrases) Le Corbusier: "A house is a machine for living." Teal is full of complaints. He says of the Moderns:

all they've done is to abandon the Wedding Cake School in favor of the Service Station School, chucked away the gingerbread and slapped on some chromium, but at heart they are as conservative and traditional as a county courthouse.

The "Wedding Cake School" and "gingerbread" refer to nineteenth-century Gothic architecture, while the "Service Station School" and "chromium" parts presumably refer to the Art Deco or Art Moderne style of the early twentieth. The Chrysler Building in New York City is a quintessential Art Deco construction, but even it has gargoyles as on a Gothic cathedral of yore. Like Howard Roark, Quintus Teal is a visionary. One difference is that he doesn't sabotage his house. Instead, his house sabotages itself.

Heinlein was also a visionary. He perceived that there was a clash between architectural modernism and traditionalism before Ayn Rand did, or at least before her novel was published. His illustration of it was more visionary still, as he carried modernism into the ultra-futuristic territory of science fiction rather than the near-futuristic territory of the real world. I will add that "'--And He Built a Crooked House--'" is a very fun story to read, and it's very funny. You might get more entertainment out of it than you will out of almost two hours of The Fountainhead.

* * *

Modernist architecture was in the news recently when the Barack Obama Presidential Center was opened in Chicago. I say "modernist" but actually "Brutalist" is probably a better description of that construction. Modernism and Brutalism aren't the same thing, but Brutalism grew out of modernism. Brutalism is associated with fascist Italy under Mussolini, but Brutalism was also in the architecture of the U.S.S.R. and Eastern Europe under the communists. According to Wikipedia, "[t]he communist newspaper Daily Worker deemed The Fountainhead to be 'an openly fascist movie.'" I can't say one way or another, but if modernism is a progressivist style, Brutalism originated in modernism, and Brutalism is also a modernist-progressivist-fascist-communist style, then I'm not sure where the ideological lines are drawn when it comes to twentieth-century architecture. Anyway, the Brutalist Obama center looks like it could have come from behind the Iron Curtain. When I first saw pictures of it, I thought of a gun tower on the surface of the Death Star. So, if you go to Chicago and pay your fee, you will be able to witness the workings of this fully operational presidential center.

* * *

On the opposite end of the century from the founding of the Bauhaus, Tom Wolfe wrote a critique of it and modern architecture in general. His critique is called From Bauhaus to Our House, and it was published in book form in 1981. The people on the receiving end of his critique did not like his critique. Go figure. No word on the opinions of Howard Roark and Quintus Teal.

* * *

I was going to close with a gag cartoon that was in The New Yorker in the 1920s or so. Alas, my books are in storage. The cartoon is of Little Red Riding Hood approaching a Bauhaus-style house that looks like a wolf. I don't remember who was the cartoonist. "Little Red Riding Hood" and stories like it are Gothic, Romantic, or folkloric. Modernism, Brutalism, and futurism are more nearly science-fictional. So in that cartoon, the Gothic or Romantic past encounters the science-fictional present and future. Does the wolf of the present-future devour the Little Red Riding Hood of the past? Or does she escape for another day?

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

A Meta-Entry

Early in the morning of Thursday, August 27, 2026, the number of visits to this blog went over 5,000,000. The rate of increase hasn't been exponential, but the number of visits is increasing very rapidly. I write on August 27. Right now there are more than 600,000 visits recorded for the month of August. By the end of the month, there may very well be over 700,000. That would be my highest monthly total ever.

Those total numbers are not reflective of the numbers for individual entries. For example, the entry entitled "Gothic Topics & Flannery O'Connor," which I posted on August 24, 2026, has had only 45 visits as of today. That's not very many. I take that low number to mean that my essay on Flannery O'Connor is not of interest to most people. That's not surprising. My blog is called "Tellers of Weird Tales." It's ostensibly about the artists and writers who contributed to "The Unique Magazine," secondarily about pulp fiction, pulp magazines, pulp writers, etc. Flannery O'Connor was none of those things and wrote none of those things. On the other hand, this is my blog, and I get to write about whatever I want.

I do write for myself, but I also write for the readers of this blog. I would like to offer you things in which you are interested. Low numbers mean something to me. When I see them, I think, "Well, that one isn't doing very well. Maybe I'd better write about something else." If I had to interpret these things, I would say that the high total numbers come from AI visits to my blog, while the much lower individual numbers are a record of visits made by real human beings. 

There are 130 members of this blog. I suspect that there are probably a couple of hundred or a few hundred regular or returning readers. Most of the entries in my blog from the past few months have had between 100 and 250 visits each. A couple come in below that range. A few are above it. The entry from this year with the most visits is "Catholic & Cosmic Horror" from January 10, 2026. It has 788 visits in all. All of that seems normal to me. The numbers that are not normal are the total numbers of visits per day, per month, and all time. Those numbers increased very rapidly once AI came on line. Before that, this blog was for human beings and the numbers were normal. Since then, it has become something for AI. That is my interpretation, as Blogger does not make a distinction between human and non-human visitors. With that being said, AI doesn't do anything it isn't prompted to do. Human beings are behind it. It's just that the real human beings who read my blog are not lazy and stupid--an assumption I make that I think you will like--while the people prompting AI to use my blog are in fact lazy and stupid. They are unwilling or incapable of thinking for themselves and so they have farmed out their thinking to a machine. That may be harsh, but sometimes harshness is called for.

The upshot of all of this is that the numbers of visits don't matter anymore. They used to, but not anymore. They have become a useless and meaningless measure. It used to be that I was encouraged by the numbers of visits. I used them as a measure of how well I was doing in this blog and how well my readers liked what I was doing (or not). Now it doesn't matter. I could be like TV shows or radio shows that have been on for a long time or are reaching the end of their run. I could just put up "encore performances" of what I have written before. I could write anything at all, endless nonsense or Lorem ipsum-type text. I could post links to cat videos. I could offer recipes or tips on hair and makeup. I could write sports drivel. I could do anything at all and there would still be visits to my blog. It just doesn't matter anymore.

I have hesitated going back to writing biographies because I know that now I would not be writing them for human beings to read. Instead, lazy and stupid people would use AI to mine information from my blog and use it for their own purposes. (To be fair, there were lazy and stupid people using what I write for their own purposes before AI came along, but at least they had to do the searching themselves.) I don't know how I might confound AI. I imagine that AI is good with simple facts and information. It may struggle with synthesis, analysis, and opinion, with complex ideas, and perhaps especially with real insight and leaps of imagination. And I wonder whether it may actually stumble over compound and complex sentences; maybe a semi-colon easily trips up an AI. If that's true, and if Cormac McCarthy were still living, then maybe he would start using them. Maybe they would become his best friend.

One solution to all of this is to go back to print. AI can still be used to mine information out of books in print, but it takes an additional step to do that. There are people being paid to take that additional step, though. It used to be that Google, which is behind Blogger, paid people to scan books that were held in libraries. Okay. The book still existed after it was scanned. Now I read that AI companies are buying large quantities of old and rare books, cutting off their bindings, scanning their pages, using text recognition software to convert them to digital formats, and throwing away what's left. The people paying for all of that should be drawn and quartered, or thrown off a cliff, or made to die by some other horrible and painful means, but they wouldn't do what they're doing if they couldn't make money off of it. And the reason they can make money off of it is because ordinary consumers will pay them for the information. This is, over and over again, the destruction of the library at Alexandria in which every person can equally and joyfully take part. This is, in short, democracy.

Another solution is for all of us, like Emily Dickinson, to put away what we write into a trunk, or, like Candide, to turn our backs on the craziness of the world and tend our own gardens. That only works, though, until the world in all of its craziness arrives at your garden gate.

So I'll keep writing for now, for myself, and for the few of you who are frontline readers, that is, real human beings with minds and interest and curiosity. If we can comfort ourselves at all, we can say that we're members of a small but prestigious club. It's not exclusive. Anyone can join. You just have to be willing to read and think for yourself and to stay away from the supposed thinking machine that may yet prove our master.

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Fiction & Regional Fiction

Weird fiction can be seen as a type of regional fiction. Setting in weird fiction is important, as is a familial, cultural, or historical past tied to a specific place. Sometimes we don't know where a weird tale is taking place. That can be disconcerting. We don't know where to anchor our reading or understanding of such a tale, nor our feelings about it. Part of the effect of a weird tale is in making the reader feel disoriented or dislocated. It's better, I think, when that feeling of disorientation or dislocation has to do with the events and occurrences in a story rather than with its setting, location, or sense of place. I think it's better to feel connected to a real (or real-fictional) place but perhaps otherwise disconnected, at least for a time, as we read. We as readers don't do well when we're floating or in free fall, out of touch with anything solid. The Rentharpian Hills aren't a real place, nor is Arkham or Innsmouth, but each has the characteristics of a real place and all are believable in that way. If there are three things in a story, one or two of them can be fantastic, but at least one of them should be real and plausible, a thing that attaches it to someplace on planet Earth and a normal, recognizable experience. The reader should feel like he or she could go to that place, or to the edge of it. Whether he or she can proceed and a weird experience ensues is another story.

The same thing can be said--i.e., that it can be seen as a type of regional fiction--of Gothic or Romantic fiction, for example, William Faulkner's Mississippi. Faulkner even invented his own county--Yoknapatawpha County--the name of which reads like something the demigod Wilbur Whateley would cry from the top of Sentinel Hill.

In contrast, it doesn't make much sense to talk about a regional science fiction. There are science fiction authors who have set their stories in a specific real-fictional place. Tales from the White Hart by Arthur C. Clark (1957) comes to mind, but that's not a perfect example. As I write, I can't think of a science-fictional place or region that is equivalent to the weird-fictional place or region, the perfect example of which is H.P. Lovecraft's New England. (Ramsey Campbell's Severn Valley is another. We're reading his stories for our book club meeting this evening.) The whole point of science fiction is to be expansive, to move forward and reach outward, not to be confined, isolated, inward, shrunken, or backward-looking as in weird fiction; to seem real and to be as plausible as possible; to be freed from the past and not in search of origins, as Gothic or Romantic fiction is, if Ronald Schleifer is correct. In other words, science fiction strives to be novelistic. That is my sense anyway.

If there was an era of weird fiction in American, British, and Irish literature, it might have begun in the 1870s or '80s and to have come to a close in the late 1930s or around the time that World War II began. That roughly seventy-year period (i.e., threescore-and-ten-years, or the biblical allotment of a man's life) corresponds roughly to the era of regionalism or local color in literature, at least in the United States. If the war brought an end to the era of weird fiction, it may also have brought an end to the era of regionalism, possibly for some of the same reasons.

I have looked for dates inclusive of regionalism in America, but I haven't found any such thing. I think of that period as from the post-Civil War period or Reconstruction to the post-Great Depression, specifically to the years of World War II, the Cold War, and the more homogeneous, nationwide culture of the 1950s and after. The 1930s seem to have been the last decade in which Americans stayed within their own locality, state, or region and to have thought of their world in those terms. There are historians who have posited or believe in cycles in American history. I wonder if there have also been cycles of genre fiction, from weird fiction or fantasy to science fiction, then to weird fiction or fantasy and so on; or periods of Gothic-Romantic fiction, followed by periods of Realistic-Novelistic fiction, followed by, etc. But that's something for another day.

Four cover illustrations by women artists, the first by Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945), the next three by Margaret Brundage (1900-1976). The first has great power. The figure in black is amorphous and unidentifiable. The artist has captured an incredible struggle. Put the next three together and they have some of the same visual and compositional elements as the first. However, they lack its power. These pictures are not illustrative of regional fiction, but maybe they show in some small way that weird fiction--and by extension all of genre fiction--did not exist in a cultural vacuum. Maybe they also show, again in some small way, that weird fiction is a diminutive of Gothic or Romantic fiction, or of fiction as a whole.

Text and caption copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley