• Castles, decaying mansions and evil creatures abound in Gothic horror.castle tower image by Lisa Batty from Fotolia.com
  
  Gothic literature is an established tradition usually centered around horrific, sometimes melodramatic supernatural events. Gothic literature dates back to 1764 and still maintains a presence in modern literature. Gothic horror especially deals with monsters, supernatural creatures and spooky locations. Frequently set in exotic lands in the past, Gothic horror books often feature vampires, magicians, werewolves, mad scientists and decaying houses or castles.
  
  

Early Gothic

• The first Gothic horror novel was "The Castle of Otranto," written by Horace Walpole in 1764. The novel centers around a horrible villain terrorizing a young girl in the Middle Ages in the dark and supernatural castle of the title. The novel was incredibly popular and led to many writers producing similar works in the new Gothic genre.
  
  

The Romantics

• The Romantics, a group of writers and poets including Lord Byron, Percy Bysse Shelley and Alfred Lord Tennyson, idealized passion over logic. They were fascinated with the Gothic genre and wrote poems and books imitating it and building on it, focusing on decaying manors, supernatural villians and exotic locations. In 1818, Percy Shelley's wife, Mary Shelley, wrote "Frankenstein," one of the most famous Gothic novels, about a mad scientist who builds a monster from corpses.
  
  

Parody

• Even when the Romantics were embracing its tropes, the Gothic novel was becoming less popular. The same year Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein," Jane Austen published "Northanger Abbey," a parody of the Gothic novel. The novel is set in an old, mysterious abbey and involves a murder plot, secret passages and supernatural terror.
  
  

Late 19th and 20th Centuries

• "Dracula," by Bram Stoker, was published in 1897 and produced one of the most famous and notorious Gothic villains of all time. Twentieth-century novelists tackled the Gothic genre as well. Shirley Jackson wrote many Gothic horror tales, including "We Have Always Lived in the Castle," centered around a mysterious family in a decrepit mansion where many people died of poisoning. William Faulkner uses Gothic tropes in "Sanctuary" and other novels set among decaying plantations and infiltrated with racial strife and lost nobility. Critics have labeled Faulkner's style Southern Gothic.