Star Trek Gothic

Like Dark Shadows, the television series Star Trek began in 1966. What I have called the Gothic Revival in our culture had begun several years before, possibly in about 1960. Dark Shadows is in the genre of the Gothic Romance and began as the girl-meets-house-type of Gothic Romance. Star Trek is of course a science fiction show. But the popularity of the Gothic Romance and Gothic culture clearly spilled over into Star Trek as early as its first season, most obviously in the episode "The Squire of Gothos," written by Don McDougall (1917-1991) and first broadcast on January 12, 1967.

The first Gothic Romance in fiction was The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1717-1797), first published on Christmas Eve in 1764. Trelane, the title character of "The Squire of Gothos," inhabits a castle of his own. His dress is eighteenth century. The setting, then, is appropriate for a Gothic Romance. Just in case we miss the reference, the place name "Gothos" lets us know that this episode of Star Trek is meant to bring back the Gothic past. There are elements of The Wizard of Oz and "The Most Dangerous Game" in "The Squire of Gothos." I have often thought that William Campbell (1923-2011), who played Trelane, and the unrelated Bruce Campbell (b. 1958) could have played a father and son in a television show of the imagination.

The Star Trek episode "Catspaw," first broadcast on October 27, 1967 (appropriate for Halloween), was written by Robert Bloch (1917-1994). He based his teleplay on his own story "Broomstick Ride," from Super-Science Fiction, December 1957. The Gothic content in "Catspaw" is far more extensive than in "The Squire of Gothos." It includes of course a castle, but there are also three witches like the three Weird Sisters in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Actress Antoinette Bower (1932-2026) memorably played the shapeshifting cat-woman. "Catspaw" was the first filmed episode of Star Trek in which Walter Koenig (1936-2026) appeared as Ensign Chekov.

Robert Bloch also wrote the teleplay for the episode "Wolf in the Fold," first broadcast on December 22, 1967. I have not read this anywhere, but it seems to me that "Wolf in the Fold" is based, at least in part, on Bloch's short story "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper," originally in Weird Tales in July 1943. If that's the case, then "Wolf in the Fold" would seem to be the only story originally in Weird Tales that was adapted to an episode of Star Trek. That makes me think that stories by H.P. Lovecraft would have made great starting points for other episodes. One that springs to mind is "The Shadow Out of Time," originally in Astounding Stories in June 1936. By the way, Lovecraft would have understood Trelane's desire to live in the eighteenth century. If only he could have traveled back in time himself.

There are other episodes of Star Trek with Gothic themes, moods, settings, atmospheres, trappings, and so on, but these are the three that came to me as I considered the topic Star Trek Gothic. Realizing that the Gothic Revival of the 1960s made its way into the very remote genre of science fiction leads me to think that there was Gothic content in other television shows of that time. It has been too long since I watched The Wild Wild West (1965-1969), but I'm pretty sure there were Gothic elements and possibly Gothic episodes in that show. I welcome other suggestions and observations.

* * *

I have been away for a long time, six and a half weeks in all. I spent a good deal of one of the most beautiful Octobers in the history of Midwestern Octobers in an oubliette. But now I'm back. I had planned to write on the topic Star Trek Gothic in September in observance of the 60th anniversary of Star Trek. I'm glad I waited, although it is for unhappy reasons. Antoinette Bower, who was in "Catspaw" and other Gothic, Romantic, weird-fictional, and horror productions, died earlier this year at the age of 93. Michael Forest, who played the god Apollo in the Star Trek episode "'Who Mourns for Adonais?'", died on October 14, 2026, at age 97. He was followed in death eleven days later by Walter Koenig. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Koenig many years ago in Columbus, Ohio. I will remember him as a good person and a good actor. Three days after that, Patrick Stewart died at age 86. It's strange to think that he was only four years younger than young Chekov.

* * *

I'll close with a quick exercise in comparison and contrast brought on by my thoughts on the topic Star Trek Gothic:

I think of science fiction as being civilized and urban, strong and steady and cerebral. In contrast, I see weird fiction and the Gothic Romance as wild, emotional, non-civilized, and rural. I don't want to stretch this idea too thinly, nor to intellectualize things too much, but maybe science fiction can be seen as Apollonian, whereas weird fiction and the Gothic Romance are more nearly Dionysian. Star Trek, as a science fiction show, is civilized and urban. The Enterprise is a city in space. Its officers and crew are civilized, controlled, and scientific in their approach to the challenges and problems placed before them. (A very emotional Doctor McCoy is an exception. A hot-blooded Captain Kirk is very often another.) Part of the stated mission of the Enterprise is "to seek out new life and new civilizations," emphasis added. However, there are, as we have seen, at least three Gothic episodes of Star Trek, and there are many episodes in which its characters are thrust into wild, uncontrolled, and non-civilized situations. They actually perform pretty well in those situations, evidence perhaps that civilization is a veneer and that we are at heart wildmen. Star Trek also followed close on the heels of The Outer Limits (1963-1965) and early on had a monster-of-the-week or alien-of-the-week feel to it. If aliens are a type of monster, and monsters are in the domain of weird fiction or horror fiction, then the science-fictional alien or monster would seem closely tied to those much older and wilder genres. And on the opposite end of its Gothic episodes are the highly civilized episodes of Star Trek, one of which may have been the literally Apollonian episode "'Who Mourns for Adonais?'"

Happy Sixtieth Anniversary to

Star Trek!

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Goth Girls-Part Four

In looking for the origins of the Goth Girl, one thing you might do is to go looking for the term. That's what I did. I searched for "goth girl" in newspapers online. The first occurrence of  "goth girl" that I found is in a review of a performance by the British band The Wonder Stuff, written by Andy Lane and published in the Tamworth Herald (England) on February 11, 1988. I suspect the term was in use well before then. It usually takes awhile before people in a larger or wider culture notice the things that develop in subcultures. (When other people notice is usually when a thing gets ruined, at least in the minds of the people who are already in that subculture.) I also found a reference in 1989 to All About Eve, a "sub-goth girl band," performing in Manchester, England. So it looks like "goth girl" was a British thing first, and that fits with the idea that the Goth Girl look started with Siouxsie Sioux and other British musicians, singers, and fans. I wrote earlier this summer about Manchester and some of its musicians. Maybe they can be proud to have had the first Goth types.

According to my search results, the term "goth girl" or "Goth girl" was used a few times every year during the 1990s. It got a lot more attention in regards to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) television show Straight Up and its character Lily, played by Sarah Polley. In an article about the show, reviewer Bonnie Malleck explained that a "goth" girl is "sort of a teenage version of spook show host Elvira." (Boldface added.) That fits with the idea that the Goth Girl is descended from the Elvira-Vampira-Morticia look of the 1930s through the mid 1980s. Ms. Malleck's article was in the Waterloo Region Record, Ontario, Canada, on March 30, 1996. The fact that she had to explain what a Goth Girl is means that the type and the look were still not well known by that name.

Early on, meaning in the 1980s and '90s, the term "goth" girl or "goth girl" appeared in quotation marks. By about 1997, the quotation marks had begun disappearing, signifying, I think, that the term Goth girl had become one that people were supposed to know or be familiar with already. Occurrences of Goth girl picked up after that until there were hundreds every year in the early 2000s. The peak year according to what I found was in 2007, when Goth girl was in newspapers 600 times.

I found an online article dated October 29, 2025, entitled "Goth-Girl Style Owes Everything To Winona Ryder." The blurb below the title reads: "From '90s muse to Tim Burton goth, Winona Ryder's legacy of red-carpet looks proves that goth-girl leanings will never go out of style." (Boldface added.) The article is on the website British Vogue. The reference is to Winona Ryder in the film Beetlejuice, released in 1988. It looks like we can still date the development of the Goth Girl look to the late 1980s.

A related look is the emo girl look. Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club (1985) is kind of an emo girl. Goth Girls and emo girls, or Emo Girls, include the girl from The Ring (2002); the character Abby Sciuto, played by Pauly Perrette in NCIS (2003 and after); the girl from The Incredibles (2004); Raven from Teen Titans Go! (2013 and after); and of course Wednesday Addams in various movies and TV shows. Those dates point to a peak year or years during the early 2000s, or around the same time that zombies (another Gothic type) were so wildly popular and started eating the brains of consumers. It looks like the same thing happened with Goth Girls and Emo Girls as what happened with Gothic Romances and stories in the 1960s: a thing starts out slow and small, it picks up speed, and then it becomes very popular and commodified, or commodified and very popular, before reaching a peak and then fading away. There is always the next big thing to take the place of the last big thing. There are still Goth Girls, but has the type become just a stereotype? Is there any room left in our culture for a new or interesting Goth Girl?

Now for some cuttings and scrapings:

Other possible influences on the Goth look: Vampires from literature and film, including Gloria Holden as the title role in Dracula's Daughter (1936); Margaret Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz (1939); Gale Sondergaard in The Blue Bird (1940); Judith Anderson in Rebecca (1940); the Nazi SS; 1950s and '60s motorcycle gangs and motorcycle movies; and plenty of musicians from the 1970s and '80s, including Alice Cooper, the Ramones, KISS, Joan Jett, Patti Smith, Chrissie Hynde (another September birthday), . . .

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Goth Girls-Part Three

I have been going through the vaults of my brain trying to think of early Goth Girls. I'm sure that the basic Goth Girl goes back a long way, but what about the specific look of the late twentieth century? Siouxsie Sioux of Siouxsie and the Banshees seems to have inspired scads of dark-haired girls and young women who, over the years and decades, have taken to wearing black clothing, black accessories, and black eye makeup. But was there anyone before her? I think of the character Jacqueline Gibson from the movie The Seventh Victim (1943), played by Jean Brooks, as an early Goth Girl. I wonder if her look could have been inspired by another fictional character who made her first appearance just five years before.

Charles Addams (1912-1988) drew more than a thousand gag cartoons during his decades-long career. His first for The New Yorker is from February 4, 1933. His first illustrating a family and household that would eventually bear his name came along on August 6, 1938. It depicts the character who would become Morticia Addams. At her side is, I think, an early version of Lurch. Addams went on to create 58 cartoons featuring his Gothic characters in their Gothic house. With her black hair, pale skin, black dress, and dour expression, the matriarch of Addams' cartoon family seems to have been a model for the Goth Girl, or a model for models.

On May 1, 1954, The Vampira Show premiered on KABC-TV in Los Angeles. The title character, played by Maila Nurmi (1922-2008), was the first television horror hostess (before any horror host). Maila Nurmi is supposed to have based the look of her character on Charles Addams' as yet unnamed cartoon matriarch. I wrote recently about the Googie style of architecture, named after Googie's Coffee Shop in Los Angeles. That's where the woman who played Vampira met James Dean (1931-1955). They became friends. Like Charles Addams, James Dean was a car enthusiast. The former suffered a heart attack in his car and died in a hospital on September 29, 1988. The latter was killed in a car crash on September 30, 1954. This week is one of anniversaries of deaths of prominent people, but I guess every week is like that. Alex Raymond, also a cartoonist and also a car enthusiast, also died in a car crash in September. His end came on September 6, 1956.

Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, was another television horror hostess. She was played by Cassandra Peterson, who was born on September 17, 1951. Yet another Happy Birthday! Elvira had her own local horror movie show in Los Angeles from 1981 to 1986. Her look was based on that of her predecessor, Vampira. And so Elvira was based on Vampira who was based on the character who would one day be named Morticia. Vampirella is a completely different character, even if she has dark hair and sometimes wears bangs.

Almost thirty years after her first appearance in a magazine gag cartoon, Morticia Addams got her own TV show called The Addams Family. It made its debut on September 18, 1964. Morticia was played to perfection by Carolyn Jones (1930-1983). The actress was a natural blonde but played one brunette or dark-haired woman after another in movies and TV shows. She wore her natural hair color in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). What a great movie and good, appealing, and attractive actress!

I have been writing about a Gothic revival that I think took place in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 1960, Paramount pictures released Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and with a screenplay by Joseph Stefano based on Robert Bloch's novel of 1959. (Bloch also had a September death date.) In that movie, a young woman, played by blonde Janet Leigh, gets in her car and attempts to drive away from the past. However, once she stops driving, she reencounters the past in the form of a psycho killer who lives, incongruously for that late date, in an Addams Family-style Gothic house. As in The Seventh Victim from seventeen years before, there is a shower scene in Psycho. Also as in that earlier film, the sister of the missing woman goes looking for her. Four years after Psycho was released, the Gothic house--a comic Gothic house--reappeared in The Addams Family television show. Unlike the heroine of the Gothic Romance, Morticia has no desire to run from her house. She is actually très heureuse there.

There is one more possible Goth Girl in today's entry. Like Jean Crane as Jacqueline Gibson, she had dark hair and wore bangs straight across her forehead. Her name was Barbara Jean Day. She was born in 1919 in Chicago and graduated from Butler University in Indianapolis in or about 1939. On May 29, 1943, she married Charles Addams in Westfield, New Jersey, a little less than two months before The Seventh Victim was released. I don't know when she started wearing bangs. She lacked them in her college yearbook picture. I wonder if she was influenced by a viewing of The Seventh Victim. I also wonder whether she was influenced in her general appearance by the Morticia Addams character. Or maybe Charles Addams went looking for women who reminded him of her. (Male artists sometimes fall in love with their creations.) Barbara Jean Day died on August 16, 2007. That was ten days after the sixty-second anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and sixty-nine years and ten days after the first Addams Family cartoon. Barbara Jean Day's second husband, John Hersey (1914-1993), wrote about the first atomic bombing in his book Hiroshima, first published in its entirety in the August 31, 1946, issue of The New Yorker. I wonder if Charles Addams had a cartoon in that issue, too.

An image of Charles Addams' original art for a cartoon published in The New Yorker in November 1939. This is one of my favorite of the Addams Family cartoons.

Charles Addams and Barbara Jean Day in a photograph that is pretty obviously staged. Despite what people have written about her, she could not have been the original for the character who would be named Morticia Addams. Addams drew Morticia before he ever met Barbara Jean. In 1938, when his first Addams family cartoon was published, she was a non-Goth-looking student at Butler University in Indianapolis. They did not meet until 1941 and were not married until 1943. And I'm pretty sure that's not an original drawing on his lap. It may be simply a tear sheet from The New Yorker. By the look of his haircut and the checked shirt, I would guess this is a postwar photograph, possibly from the late 1940s or early 1950s. Notice the Audubon print on the wall: those are his depictions of the common American gull.

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Goth Girls-Part Two

The dark-haired bad girl in literature and culture goes back at least as far as the nineteenth century. Leslie Fiedler wrote about her in his book Love and Death in the American Novel (1961; 1966). The goth girl, or Goth Girl, of the late twentieth century came along after he wrote, but my guess is that the Goth Girl is a variation on the dark-haired bad girl. (1)

In contrast to the dark-haired bad girl is the blonde or fair-haired good girl, who is pure and innocent, the love interest or the object of desire. She is often a damsel in distress and in need of being rescued. One obvious example of the dark-haired/fair-haired dichotomy is in Superman Returns, from 2006. Lois Lane is and always has been dark-haired, but in Superman Returns, she was made into a blonde, played by Kate Bosworth. That decision on the part of the moviemakers seems to have been self-conscious. It amounts to a kind of cultural appropriation. On the other side of the conflict is the dark-haired consort of Lex Luthor, played by the more attractive (in my opinion) Parker Posey. (2) She's bad, but she ends up turning good, or not-so-bad. That doesn't save the movie from an attack of blondeness, and skinny blondeness at that. Like you, I wonder why moviemakers can't just leave things alone.

Before beginning this series, I read about the possible origins of the Goth Girl. I came up with some of my own possible origins to go along with what I read. I'll start with silent movie actresses.

That's Theda Bara (1885-1955) as Cleopatra, from a lost film of the same name from 1917. Note the heavy black eye makeup, which has become an identifying feature of the Goth Girl. Note the hands to the head pose, too, as in the Batwoman cover of Weird Tales. I wonder if this picture could have been an inspiration for Margaret Brundage. Maybe she traded a Snakewoman or Aspwoman for a Batwoman.

I also wondered whether Theda Bara could have followed the example of Mata Hari (1876-1917), who was shot by a firing squad in the same year that Cleopatra was released. (Not that Theda Bara followed her example by being shot, because she never was. You know what I'm trying to say.) Here she is in her Eastern costume:

Mata Hari was also a performer, also with an Oriental look. (She had lived in the Dutch East Indies before returning to Europe.) I don't associate Arabism or Orientalism with Gothicism at all. I'm not sure that Mata Hari, Theda Bara (her name can be taken as an anagram of "Arab Death"), or any other Eastern-inspired woman, look, style, or culture is a source for twentieth-century Gothics. Gothics are wholly  and distinctly Western. I don't think it makes any sense to talk about an Eastern or Oriental Gothic.

I'll mention two other dark-haired silent movie actresses who sometimes played bad girls. They were:

Pola Negri (1897-1987) and:

Louise Brooks (1906-1985). 

One source puts forth Bettie Page (1923-2008) as a possible influence on the Goth Girl look. I'm not so sure about that, although she was certainly an influence on the current Rockabilly style. Here I might pose a question: is pornography, at least of a certain type, a Gothic form?

The Bettie Page-style, the Rockabilly style, the 1950s Bad Girl or Beat style, the 1940s and '50s Apache Dance style, and the 1940s and '50s French Resistance and French Existentialist look all seem to go together. All seem to reinforce each other. But I'm not sure they have a lot to do with the Goth Girl look. Maybe Siouxsie Sioux really was its originator.

Bettie Page famously wore bangs. The story is that a photographer suggested that she wear them to keep the photographer's lights from reflecting off of her high forehead. There doesn't seem to be any connection at all between Bettie Page and another woman who, less famously, wore bangs. I'm pretty sure she can be called a Goth Girl:

That's Jean Brooks (1915-1963) as the dark-haired bad girl/early Goth Girl (?) Jacqueline Gibson in The Seventh Victim, from 1943. Kim Hunter, on the right, played her good-girl younger sister. The film was produced by Val Lewton (1904-1951), who was a teller of weird tales. He wrote "The Bagheeta," which was published in the July 1930 issue of Weird Tales.

I wondered last time about the possibility of an urban girl-meets-house-type Gothic Romance. Well, The Seventh Victim is an urban Gothic involving a cult of middle-class devil worshippers in New York City. (Cults are popular among the real-world middle class.) Other urban Gothics include Rosemary's Baby (1968), from Ira Levin's novel; The Exorcist (1973), from William Peter Blatty's novel; and The Sentinel (1977), from Jeffrey Konvitz's novel. Although I have not read this book, I think The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall by George Lippard (1845) was an early American urban Gothic. There are no doubt many, many more. (3) 

Jacqueline Gibson has a certain look. If she was an early Goth Girl, where did she get it? I'm not sure about that one, either, but I will write next about an indisputable Goth Girl who first showed up in American culture in the 1930s.

Notes

(1) In thinking about the dark-haired bad girls of culture, I considered Lilith and Morgan le Fay. Lilith is sometimes depicted as having golden hair, but she is also thought of as having dark hair. Her hair, whatever its color, is important in her power. Lilith is also thought of as a strangler of babies. That goes to a current real-life case in the United States. The strangler in that case has dark hair. She seems to have come under a demonic influence. Her followers are certainly under a demonic influence. They seem to have their own cult. As for Morgan le Fay, she may be depicted with brown hair, but in Hal Foster's Prince Valiant, she has dark, if not black, hair.

(2) If you want, you can make something of the characters' names, too. Lois Lane's surname is monosyllabic and from the British Isles, in other words, from "here." Kitty Kowalski's surname is polysyllabic and Slavic, in other words, from "there." Lois Lane's consonants are soft. They are repeated in la-la and lullaby. Kitty Kowalski's are hard. They are repeated for example in Kallikak or Ku Klux Klan. (There was a TV show called The Kallikaks. If I remember right, one of the justifications for that show is that the K sound is supposed to be funny.) Lois shares her initials with Lex Luthor, the nemesis of the man with whom she is in love. Superman--Kal-El--shares his with Kitty. His name is from the Hebrew. Lois' name is biblical and is in the New Testament. Lois may be a Greek name. Lex is in fact Greek. Only Kitty Kowalski has a low or diminutive name.

(3) Others include: The Search for Joseph Tully by William H. Hallahan (1974); Wolfen (1981), from the novel by Whitley Streiber; etc. We could go on and on in this list.

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Goth Girls-Part One

Women who run from houses are the heroines of the Gothic Romance, but that's not the same as being a goth girl. The heroine of the Gothic Romance goes back a long way, definitely to the nineteenth century, possibly to the one before it. The goth girl as we know her is supposed to have originated in the 1980s. But what were her origins before her origins?

I'll start with three pictures:

That's Siouxsie Sioux of the band Siouxsie and the Banshees. The picture is from the 1980s. Siouxsie Sioux is supposed to have created the goth girl look. I don't know enough about these things to say one way or another, but even if she didn't create it, she was there near the beginning. I went looking for the picture above because I wanted to find something similar to this one:

That's Margaret Brundage's cover illustration for the November 1933 issue of Weird Tales magazine featuring what looks like a goth girl. I kind of hate the word iconic, but this image has become almost iconic. Maybe emblematic is a better word. When people want to show a cover of Weird Tales, this is usually the one. Alistair Durie used it for the cover of his book Weird Tales, published in 1979, at around the time Siouxsie Sioux was really hitting it big. Reginald Smith had used it previously for his booklet Weird Tales in the Thirties, from 1966. Here's another image from that prime year in pop culture:

This one is a picture of Julie Newmar as Catwoman, from the TV show Batman. Was she a goth girl? I guess so. You will soon see more about Batman, like within minutes. By the way, Julie Newmar was born in 1933, the same year in which Margaret Brundage's Batwoman cover was published. Her birthday was a month ago, so Happy Birthday, Julie Newmar!

Here's another picture of a possible goth girl from another show that made its debut in 1966:

That's actress Antoinette Bower from the Star Trek episode "Catspaw," with a teleplay by teller of weird tales Robert Bloch. "Catspaw" is one of at least three Gothic episodes of Star Trek. I'll write about them soon, hopefully in the 60th anniversary month of the first broadcast of the show. Born on September 30, 1932, in Baden-Baden, Germany, Antoinette Bower died earlier this year, on April 30, 2026, in California. I'm sorry to see her go, but this is as it ever was and ever will be for us on this earth. I wish I could have found a picture of her with her hands to her face in keeping with the current theme and motif.

Speaking of which:

Here's Adam West as Batman doing the Batusi. Batman isn't a goth girl, but Batman is in the Gothic-Romantic tradition, or of the Gothic-Romantic genre. Batman haunts Gotham City, of course. The name lets us know of its Gothic atmosphere and Gothic origins. He and his city and milieu are in contrast to the science-fictional character Superman and his Apollonian city Metropolis. You could also place Batman in the category of the weird hero genre, which began as such in the pulps. The Shadow is another example of the weird hero. Byron Preiss published a series of Weird Hero anthologies in the 1970s. Adam West, who died in 2017, was born in September, so Happy Birthday to the spirits of him and Antoinette Bower.

I mentioned this cover the other day:

This is Bob Kane's cover for Detective Comics #31, from September 1939, or 87 years ago this month. This is clearly a Gothic-Romantic image, complete with a full moon, bats on the wing, and a dark and forbidding castle. There is even a red-robed cultist. I guess he is that "terrifying master of crime known as The Monk!" Notice that the woman in his clutches is blonde. Blonde women do not make goth girls. The goth girl is always dark-haired, or, as in the case of Amelia, purple-haired. The one possible exception I can think of is Alannah Currie of the Thompson Twins, who turns sixty-nine years old today. Another Happy Birthday!

In thinking about the origins of the goth girl, I remembered Leslie Fiedler and his book Love and Death in the American Novel, the second edition of which was published in--when else?--1966. In that book, Dr. Fiedler pointed out that the blonde woman in our literature is pure and innocent, while the dark-haired woman is very often corrupt or fallen in some way. We continue to see this in movies and TV shows of today. One of my dark-haired sisters noticed the phenomenon a long time ago. She didn't like it very much. The dark-haired goth girl fits with that stereotype.

As I pondered on the origins of the dark-haired bad girl or goth girl, my thoughts went to a Gothic fiction called The Quaker City, or The Monks of Monk Hall by the American George Lippard, from 1845. I don't know why my thoughts went in that direction. It seems to me that the poor victim in that book is a young blonde woman. Maybe there is a dark-haired woman on the opposite side of things. Anyway, it's a strange coincidence in what I write today that the Batman villain in the illustration above is called The Monk. I have never read The Quaker City, but I would like to. I have been interested in it since I first read about it in Leslie Fielder's book. Now I wonder if there was ever a girl-meets-house-type Gothic Romance paperback cover of a girl running from a house in the city. In other words, has there ever been an urban Gothic Romance? In the next part of this series I'll have an example of the urban goth girl.

To be continued . . .

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Cycles of Genre Fiction

There are people who believe in cycles of history, including American history. If there are cycles of history, then a historian might discover them. If there are not cycles of history, a historian can still impose his predetermined theory or system upon the facts of history and make it look like there are cycles. He can interpret or bend the facts to fit his ideas. That's always the hazard in postulating theories and systems, for we as human beings don't live our lives by such things. A person who lives his life by a system is likely to be frustrated and unhappy. He is also likely to punish his fellow human beings for not going along with him or it.

Knowing these things is not going to stop me from speculating on possible cycles of genre fiction.

If they exist, the cycles of genre fiction are of science fiction and its alternatives, which include weird fiction, horror, fantasy, and Gothic-Romantic fiction. For simplicity's sake, I'll lump those last genres into one called weird fiction. In science fiction, we're in control of our lives and we use science as our ultimate tool, the Swiss army knife by which we treat and solve all problems. In weird fiction, we're not in control of our lives, and there may not be any solutions. We lack most tools. Problems may go on and on.

Generally speaking: science fiction is Apollonian. It is linear, plot-driven, novelistic, modernistic, and progressive or forward-looking. In science fiction, there is a satisfactory resolution to the story. Generally speaking: weird fiction is Dionysian. It is more often weblike or oceanic and is not generally plot-driven. It more often focuses on mood or atmosphere and may be more character-driven, or the emphasis is on the human individual. Weird fiction is Gothic-Romantic. It is conservative and backward-looking. Its main form is the short story or tale because effects of mood, atmosphere, and emotion, as well as the suspension of disbelief and immersion in a story are sustainable for only so long, i.e., as long as it takes to read a short story in one sitting. Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce wrote short stories and eschewed the novel for a reason (assuming that reason was not sour grapes). Weird fiction is not modernistic. It may even be folkloric. In weird fiction, there may not be any resolution at all to the story, or the resolution is ambiguous or only for the short term.

Science fiction would seem fitted to positive, optimistic, and prosperous times, but that's not always so, for science fiction offers hope even in hard times. Weird fiction would seem fitted to hard times, but even in good times there are doubters, naysayers, doomsayers, gadflies, cynics, and skeptics. Jeremiah, Gloomy Gus, Eeyore, and Ambrose Bierce live everywhere.

If genres arose and were then divided at around the time of World War I, then cycles of genre fiction may have begun only then. Even if they didn't, the era of weird fiction in America may have begun in the 1870s or '80s and extended until the late 1930s or early 1940s. Weird Tales began in March 1923, less than five years after the war had ended and at a time when the horrors of war had already come home. Amazing Stories began in April 1926, but science fiction seems to have taken awhile to develop. The 1920s and early to mid '30s were a time of weird fiction and Weird Tales, for monster movies and horror movies.

Weird Tales changed hands in 1938. Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft were gone by then. Of the Big Three, that left only Clark Ashton Smith, who never had the following that his fellows did and never would. Also in 1938, the new editor of Astounding Science-Fiction, John W. Campbell, Jr., initiated what was, in retrospect, known as the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Weird Tales lasted another sixteen years (it even published science fiction stories), but the 1940s, '50s, and early '60s were a time for science fiction. The same things were true at the movie theater: again, movies about monsters and horror were very popular in the 1920s, '30s, and early '40s. Science fiction movies took off after World War II and were very popular in the 1950s.

Weird fiction, including the Gothic Romance, made a comeback in the 1960s. That was due in part to nostalgia, and we should never underestimate the power of nostalgia in causing the cycles of pop culture to turn. There was also a questioning of science fiction, or a reevaluation of what it is or what it might be or should be. There was even the question of whether science fiction was dying. The British New Wave, which seems to have shared some characteristics with weird fiction and Gothic-Romantic fiction, arose in the 1960s. Science fiction seems to have become more negative, pessimistic, skeptical, or Dionysian at that time. On the other hand, there was the positive and optimistic example of Star Trek. On the other, other hand, Rod Serling began the 1960s as host of the science-fictional Twilight Zone. Ten years later he was host of the weird-fictional Night Gallery. Remember that the gallery of paintings is a convention in the Gothic Romance.

In thinking and writing about the Gothic Romance of the 1960s, I also thought of Harlan Ellison's story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," published in IF: Worlds of Science Fiction in March 1967, which can be seen as a haunted house type of story. The place in which its human characters are trapped is not a haunted house, but they are nonetheless trapped and tormented by an entity that is indistinguishable from the monsters or ghosts of weird fiction and supernatural horror fiction. There isn't any escape for them. Science and technology are of no help to them. In fact, science and technology are the cause of their problems. Their being trapped is not a physical condition. It is in fact existential.

Science fiction was again popular in the 1970s. That culminated in the Star Wars phenomenon. Star Wars isn't actually science fiction, but it looks like science fiction. It spawned all kinds of things, including Battlestar Galactica, The Black Hole, and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Star Trek was still very popular in the 1970s and '80s. That popularity led to the creation of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which survived in one form or another into the current century. The Black Hole is a Gothic science fiction. The spaceship Cygnus, a great Crystal Palace in the sky, is like a Gothic house, a haunted house, complete with secret inhabitants. It was released the same year, 1979, in which Alien, a science-fiction horror story, was released, also the same year in which "Cars" by Gary Numan came out. The video of "Cars" is science-fictional, but it's also slightly scary and paranoid. In other words, it is negative and seemingly against the main idea of science fiction, which is that science and technology will make our lives and the future better.

Cyberpunk, influenced by and named after genres of music, came along in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It is a sub-genre of science fiction, but, like New Wave, it has things in common with weird fiction or Gothic-Romantic fiction. Horror movies and psycho-killer/slasher movies were also popular in the 1980s. There were lots of vampires, then zombies in popular culture. Vampires and zombies were especially popular in the 1990s and early 2000s. Music turned more pessimistic or negative, or at least more emotional, in the 1990s. Emos and goth girls arrived. (I will soon write about goth girls.) There was even horror in music videos. I wrote about some of that earlier this summer. The supposed "New Weird" was also a development of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The supposed "New Weird" appears to have been an attempt at a fusion of science fiction and weird fiction. It was in explicit imitation of the British New Wave of the 1960s.

I don't know where we are now.

So are there any patterns in all of that? Are there actually cycles in genre fiction? Well, possibly, at least at first. A half-turn of a cycle of weird fiction ran from 1923 to 1938 or 1940-1941. That was followed by a half-turn of science fiction that ran from 1938 to at least 1960. Weird fiction made a return then, and came to influence (I guess?) science fiction. The 1970s-1980s seem to have been a time for science-fiction. And then weird fiction came back again. I don't know what is the current state of science fiction. Popular culture--or our whole culture and society--now seems very dark, negative, pessimistic, and even nihilistic. That kind of culture cannot sustain a plausible science fiction, at least of any pure kind, if there is such a thing. Once weird fiction got into science fiction in the 1960s, it may have stuck, possibly for good in or after the 1980s or 1990s. I don't sense the existence of any great, soaring hope, optimism, innocence, affirmation, or aspiration as in the science fiction culture of the 1920s through the 1940s and '50s. There are no longer new worlds, and the future doesn't look very bright. Unlike Timbuk 3, we won't need shades. (And now, after reading about that band, I find out that there is such a thing as gothic country music.) The current state of AI--or fears about AI--indicate that "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" may be what awaits us.

If there are cycles in genre fiction, are cycles of weird fiction shorter than cycles of science fiction? Do cycles track with generational changes in readers? Do cycles track with economics and politics, especially with war, with science fiction being more popular during good economic times or during times of prevailing liberalism, and weird fiction during hard times or more conservative eras? I don't know. Like I said, the idea that there are cycles may be just that, an idea, with little or no basis in reality or history.

And now I feel like Indiana Jones: after all of that effort, I realize that what I have done here may not make any difference at all.

Anyway, these are just things to think about for three days until something else appears in this space.

Happy Constitution Day, America!

Text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

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.

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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