Three Recent Gothic Fictions – Stephan Crown-Weber
June 15, 2026
To grasp the Gothic, a good refresher may be a novel that flirts with the genre. Fantastic and full of unreason and vice, the Frenchman Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Songes d’un Hermite (or A Dreaming Hermit) (1770), would in a certain light seem to have the requisite Gothic ingredients. In the narrator’s dreams, the recollected subject of all the book’s epistles, there are ghosts, catacomb sepulchers, conceited chateau dwellers, vampires in government, squabbling archeologists, the Apocalypse, an angel, extraterrestrials, a reanimated mummy, the disguised Ancient of Days—a windstorm passes by, as does a curse, a march of thousands of departed souls, and a painting portending the masses’ doom—also, lackadaisical doctors trigger insanity. The narrator’s anxiety pervades the letters. But surely the surplus of fantastic plot points would push the Gothic premise to the breaking point on a good day. It is also not quite Gothic because many sentences per dream, didactic moreover, reiterate that the titular hermit is recollecting sardonically and in disbelief. It is not quite Gothic because little else of the dangerous outside world seems to intrude on the hermit’s narrations in seclusion unless via satire. The hermit seems especially aware of the danger and madness entailed in the very new Gothic genre yet counteracts these analytically/metafictionally.
Algorithmically, I happened upon three standalone indie US fiction books this spring, WE DAT, Ghouls in Love, and NTTN—all three, after that Mercier, feel Gothic since each is about something-like-madness (or a curse)—and about villainy and seediness with a sense of urgency and foreboding. Horror may break out—but the term Gothic remains useful because lived-in, ambient forlornness and frailty are the context that make a broken body part especially horrifying or even…aesthetic.
Dee P.R. Kay, an author or collective whose moniker seems to be a jibe about North Korea, finds an abjectness in an independently published novella, called WE DAT, that feels utterly spontaneous. Even a Greek chorus makes an appearance:
“We dat black mass gospel at 3 a.m when something feels wrong — real wrong.
We dat kid who got the fuck beat outta him, buried the trauma, and kept movin’.
We dat bowl of gumbo you gotta pick crab shells out of —but mmm, dat good and spicy as hell…” (120, epilogue)
The setting in 2020 tells us in advance something bad may happen to an art collector and his prostitute companion. Meanwhile, I wondered if every major tourist-grade New Orleans grotesquerie was inventoried before being dosed out. That alone prevents me from construing WE DAT as especially Dadaist Gothic, as applicable as Tzara may be here: “Dada; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the othersphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment…” (trans. Motherwell).
That said, WE DAT qualifies as chernukha, trying diligently to be about filth (think crushing a kitten). I also fell into a dream while reading the book one night and saw the protagonists eating shrimp sloppily.
The climax was too off kilter, the structure of things too inverted, to feel like slop, yet WE DAT contains many AI(?) images evocative of the year 2024 when this technology finally went mainstream. Surely few indie books intentionally intersperse AI images in their pages, and I cannot think of another that does so. In yet another instance, Dee P.R. Kay seems to sense a taboo and therefore an opportunity.
In Eric Subpar’s novel Ghouls in Love—not unlike a number of the original Gothic novels, the characters’ normalcy is initially established with sentences that observe wackiness from a sober place. Accordingly, I cheered when seemingly conformist protagonists careened into eccentricity/danger and into a wilderness, interacting with a forlorn ambulance, a mysterious book, and notes in that fiction’s margins. Lily thinks of herself as put-upon and mature as opposed to airheaded and coddled husband, Will. I celebrated villainy/hypocrisy many subsequent times, such as when, despite resenting Will for family money, Lily fantasizes about dazzling others at a dinner party with exploits from their forest vacation.
Much properly needed humor flows meanwhile, such as the narrator noting: “[Will] imagined wizards on mopeds and the fractal view of wild ferns inside the hull of an erotic space adventure. Everything churning over itself; reflecting time as a microcosm within a macrocosm and so on.”(1)
Key to Ghouls in Love’s success is how much humanity is mixed in. As weird as the story gets, many brand names remain as well as knowing references to back-to-nature/back-to-cosmos figures like Alan Watts/Thoreau. Will at one point takes off his boots on a long trek to smell them in celebration, assessing how stinky his feet can become. The scene evoked masculine quirkiness that is neither toxic nor mild, one inflected by parental permissiveness. The depiction of this eccentricity draws strength from its rarity in the art I consume. Pancaking with the stories of bedraggled addicts from another class, we get a sense of eccentricity as a fine veneer that conceals no middle-class superiority as ghoulish reality sets in.
Maybe it distorts things that I read the latter half of this book at a chamber concert, but three plot layers, three types of chapters knot together in my mind knot together like a particularly beautiful set of themes in a final movement. Strange cosmic ties are forged, just as this talk of microcosm and macrocosm promised in the passage I cite. Maybe it’s “cosmic horror.” Maybe it’s more an illustration of a discombobulating Eastern idea reaching us by way of Watts. With that said, I mostly felt mastery by association by witnessing how a totality grimly coheres.
David C. Porter’s NTTN is a comic noir detective novel—and a bit grimdark. NTTN is centered around an unnamed pair, “the tall detective and the thin detective,” investigating throughout their immense, dirty city an implicitly avant-garde rogue television station, an unknown drug, and many murders; the comedy lies largely in the emphasis on the extremely oneiric and sculptural—yet the writing is played straight in a way that hypothetically comparably eerie cultural products such as Welcome to Night Vale—a good example of the not-quite-Gothic—approach yet constantly betray with an implied smirk, though like Night Vale, NTTN is about establishing a sense of place, often in a way that goes beyond any clear meaning.
The passage below is on the mundane end of ones in NTTN, yet is both sober and weird. The carefully dosed instance of the word “dismal” does a lot of work, and is of a piece with writing that is simply more expressionist and aware of comedic potential than other noir is:
“The eye’s journey towards the terminal point was disrupted only by a single door, pale and dismal, set into the left wall about halfway down the corridor. The door was very slightly ajar, a fact which the two detectives had only just noticed when the phone rang, on an internal line. It was dispatch. They had a new case.”(9)
NTTN as a novel additionally evokes the episodic staccato of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, Kafka’s cryptic leanness, and the deranged smuttiness of Snyder’s Sin City or Lynch’s Inland Empire, except more inland as expanded upon in dreams for seven hours. The book containing NTTN, interspersed with black-and-white photos of industrial detritus, is on that count alone a remarkable art object.
All this said about the “Gothic,” I should add that the prism of my mind sees each of the three recent books I have spotlighted primarily as instances of cleverness and brevity rather than scary or atmospheric books, even if those latter components kept registering. If I did read as a “genre guy”—it was with certain hard facts about pragmatically shaping a book rather than book structure disappearing before the diegetic “reality” of characters and mood. There are many lessons about craft within genre that do shine through, though, in all cases. For example: “Apparently, a little gore goes a long way.”
The immensity of unread books stretches out before me like a barely visitable metropolis or forest. No idea whether the likes of a Foreclosure Gothic fits in this wheelhouse either because of this. Appropriately, many books will not bill themselves as Gothic—their authors, as in the above cases, may seemingly/plausibly not hang out on the “‘horror’-in-bio” Internet either—but that amorphous repertoire of dread and fallibility keeps creeping up with an air of ancientness and atavism.
Recent books reviewed:
Kay, Dee P.R. We Dat. All Black, No Apologies LLC, 2025. Buy
Porter, David C. NTTN. Organ Bank Industries, 2025. Buy
Subpar, Eric. Ghouls in Love. Pig Roast Publishing, 2025. Buy