Has ever a writer enjoyed a more enviable following of ardent fans than Neil Gaiman? I suspect not, but I’m ready to argue the toss with you – so long as you first read this New Yorker feature on Gaiman and his work, in which his blog alone is reckoned to have 1.4 million readers. The New Yorker’s Dana Goodyear finds Gaiman amiably describing his career as ‘critic-proof’, and attributing his recent succession of New York Times #1 bestsellers to ‘his ability to communicate directly with his fans: he tells them to buy a book on a certain day, and they do.’ The piece ends with a sketch of Gaiman’s appearance at a book festival in Georgia, USA, Goodyear observing:

There were a thousand people in the audience. Gaiman told them he would stay as long as it took to sign for everyone. “I will sign until my hand falls off!” he said… They cheered wildly. It was a school night, so the children lined up first…

Yes, I think that just about covers all the bases: Mr Gaiman, surely, has everything a contemporary fiction writer could possibly wish for. Whatever envy his lesser-read peers might feel is soothed at least by the fact that his success is, of course, richly deserved.

Gaiman is an accomplished storyteller, a yarn-spinner, a re-worker of old myth and folklore, above all a compelling fantasist. His work hops in and out of various genres but the abiding tone is one of wonderment and of magic, some of it distinctly black. Goodyear does note that certain ‘internet critics’ speak scornfully of Gaiman’s fans as ‘’Twee ‘Bisexual’ Goth Girls with BPD (borderline personality disorder.)’’ Possibly this says more about the incivility of ‘internet critics’ than about Gaiman, but I’d say it does at least point us to a significant reason for his allure: the enduring appeal, the dark radiance of the Gothic strain in literature – that special atmospheric blend of horror and romance, fear and sublimity, melodrama and moodiness, extremes of all kinds. The Gothic is catnip to kids of pretty much all ages, but clearly it continues to exercise its sinister charm on a lot of us older folks too.

The analogue to Gaiman in the cinema world is probably Tim Burton. I once heard a buyer for a music/books/DVD chain refer cheerfully to a customer-type he and his colleagues thumb-nailed as ‘Tim Burton Boy/Girl’: black-clad, pale-skinned, and dead keen on any sort of art that was perversely out there on the edge, by Burton or anyone else of that Gothic bent. Surely some of those same customers have enabled the stunning success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight franchise. Vampires, of course, are at the heart of the Gothic, a toothsome way to frame a villain as a Byronic hero, ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know.’ Bram Stoker’s Dracula was not a man you’d want to meet after dark, but Meyer has followed latter-day Hollywood in writing directly to the dream-lives of adolescents who lap up fantasy-versions of their own alienation – hence the vampire as soulful, hollow-cheeked hotty.

Thanks to such disparate luminaries as Gaiman and Meyer I do think we’re at a lively cultural moment to be thinking anew about the Gothic. In the spirit of full disclosure I will confess that I am currently at work on a contemporary Gothic novel – indeed, at the risk of sounding like old Count Dracula himself, I’ve been at it for what feels like centuries. What appeals to me in this mode is, I think, the same as what appeals to everyone else: that sense of luxurious darkness, of pleasurable chills, but also of a veiled commentary on our shared existential plight. The fine American critic Paul Zweig once wrote that ‘the Gothic novel is a conduit for the mythology of modern times’, which might be a fancy way of saying that the core Gothic metaphors – imprisonment and escape from prisons or from bodies, life eternal or life reanimated – speak to us endlessly.

A timely piece of publishing for our consideration is Penguin’s canny re-issuing of ten vintage titles under the banner of ‘Victorian Bestsellers’, i.e. novels of a sensational bent that were read keenly in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. Penguin have shrewdly squeezed in some of the ur-texts of Gothic fiction that hail from the late 1700s: Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796), and Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794.) Readers unacquainted with these delicious works may brace themselves for a cavalcade of Faustian pacts, torturous sexual passions, magnificently gloomy landscapes and architecture, and heroes and heroines at the extremes of naivety and/or wickedness.

In praising them thus, I admit, I rather confirm that The Gothic is generally held as a disreputable sort of reading pleasure. Paul Zweig connected its early success to the eighteenth century spread of education, print and literacy – i.e. to new and unsophisticated readers, who sought from books the more familiar thrills of the oral tradition. (‘Twas a dark and stormy night…’) But this is perhaps a bit sniffy: the best Gothic novels clearly contain something vital and powerful, conveyed with considerable style. The Gothic is a driving force that rides a dangerously fine line between the Sublime and the Ridiculous, but when done with conviction it shoots right down that razor’s edge. One should note, too, that there are contemporary practitioners of the Gothic – Patrick McGrath, say, or Susan Hill – who offer all the elegance and unease of the old tradition but with none of the lurid or overwrought bits.

I will concede that my personal favourite Gothic works hail from the late 1800s and enjoy a slightly higher literary standing than old ‘Monk’ Lewis: Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Stoker’s Dracula (1897.) Actually, the true merits of Dracula are a little more debatable: you could say it’s all downhill after the first 80-90 pages. And, just as Morrissey once lamented of Manchester, Bram Stoker too has ‘so much to answer for.’ If Dracula is not the most distinguished English novel of the nineteenth century (and it isn’t), it’s surely the most sensational and influential. The playwright/screenwriter Christopher Hampton, who adapted Dracula into a musical, has spoken of it as the sort of novel you jump on as a child, ‘in search of the red meat of sensation.’ So it was for me, and though I’m pushing 40 I still feel like a 10-year-old when I read Stoker’s description of Dracula slithering down his castle walls (‘with considerable speed, just as a lizard.’)

Still, as Hampton wisely observes, ‘there must be some reason why the story has lingered for so long in people’s psyches.’ For him it’s because Dracula is ‘the late nineteenth-century novel about repression’, one whose underlying theme is ‘on the one hand, terror of sex, and, on the other, the fact that sex is quite terrifying.’ What Hampton claims for Dracula is true for the Gothic at large: it can take things that are familiar and beloved to us and turn a mirror on them that reveals all facets, light and dark. In the Gothic world good certainly doesn’t always triumph over evil – at the very least evil is shown to persist and radiate through human affairs. And that is morally useful to us as readers, whatever age we are. At heart, even as children, we understand that the best fairytales are not about childish wish-fulfilment but, rather, the getting of wisdom: the sorcerer’s apprentice makes a devil’s pact, and there’s a price to pay for a wish to come true. In short, and in life as in art, there are times when we all need a drop of the dark stuff. Make mine Gothic.

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