It’s creating a safe space in which you can feel all these extremes. That’s why the Gothic is so irresistible. The reader is as much a character as any of the fictional characters in the book because they’re so affected by it: moved to dread, terror, and repulsion. Half way through the novel the narrator turns to the reader and says, “emotions are my events.” In real Gothic fiction, the events that are really important are the emotions that are evoked by the reading. The other - this is a guiding principle for me in my writing - is a line from Melmoth the Wanderer.

This encoding of all our own desires is where the true Gothic lies. That enable us to imprint on this utterly compelling character our own darkest desires, obsessions, and impulses. You have this simultaneously wicked and tragic, repulsive and attractive character, who is an embodiment of desire and power and degradation. One of them is the way the Gothic works is to put a kind of delicious flesh on the bones of our darkest and most nebulous impulses and fears. You said in your Aeon essay that the Gothic is an irresistible space for lots of readers. I think the Gothic is a way of dealing with that. The idea of sin and transgression and something out there, a darkness, had been very much part of my formative years. I was bought up in a very strict religious background. So, my PhD became about the Gothic, and I began to study it and realise I was writing in a gothic tradition and I started to embrace it and to love it. But once it’s been suggested to you you write in a certain way, you can’t help but become self-aware. I thought the Gothic was rather absurd stories of girls in night gowns running away from villains. I was surprised to discover that I was considered to be writing in the Gothic tradition with my first book. Foreign Policy & International Relations.

Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin