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Individual works as well as authors whose entire catalogs are "must reads" for any darkling worth his or her salt and ashes. I, Mister Mephisto, will admit to something of a preoccupation with Gothic and Victorian literature, so it's likely that my biases will show through in this listing a bit more so than in other areas.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
Tales of blood and madness, murder and treachery, vengeance and loneliness. The body of Poe's work is one of America's biggest contributions to Victorian-era literature.
Also the inventor of the "detective story", Poe's work went on to inspire Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. His stories and poems of despair, lost loves, gothic manors, loneliness, and murders most foully done are really the penultimate in dark literature - by which every writer of horror has since been measured. Pretentious and critical to the last, but with the artistic chops to back it up, Poe will always be gother-than-thou. Frankenstein (1818) - Mary Shelley
Another piece of required goth reading - the movies have never done this story justice.
Mary Shelley's tale of science gone mad and pride that goeth before a fall - followed by a stubborn, mad vengeance that destroys a man completely - this tale deals with themes of alienation, ostracism, loneliness, and isolation combined with an interesting critique of the responsibilities of a creator both to his creations and for the awful things those creations have wrought. The Vampyre (1819) - John Polidori
The earliest known vampire story (as opposed to legend or myth), Polidori's The Vampyre was supposedly inspired by the fragment of a story written Lord Byron when he and the Shelleys had their little writing game that resulted in Frankenstein.
Gloomy and stark, a tale of darkness and woe, the titular vampire, Lord Ruthven, went on to inspire Bram Stoker's Dracula. Wuthering Heights (1847) - Emily Brontë
I am a fan of all the Brontë sisters' works, but Wuthering Heights takes the proverbial cake when it comes to both goth (the subculture) and Gothic (the literary genre) literature.
The tale of passionate, and even cruel, love in a time of rising Victorian dispassion - the characters were considered "unlikeable" and the story "disagreeable" at the time. And yet none could ignore the vehement intensity and power inherent in each chapter. It also crossed boundaries in defying class-ism, criticized the extant tradition of "marrying well" as a euphemism for marrying for money, and de-romanticized love from a light and airy thing to a powerful force capable of destroying whole generations in its wake. The Way of All Flesh(1903) - Samuel Butler
Butler's cutting semi-autobiographical critique of Victorian hypocrisy, both familial and religious.
So vicious was it, in fact, that he refused to see it published while he was alive because he feared it to be too contentious (and, perhaps, wished to spare himself the reproach of family members so clearly caricatured in the story). Butler's keen wit and critical eye makes what would otherwise be a dull and fairly morose familial saga into a delight of lambasting segues and all-too-controversial-for-its-time commentary. |
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
Seriously. anything by Oscar Wilde is amazing.
Witty, biting, sarcastic, critical, and satirical - all while maintaining an air of elegant banter and playfulness. Whether it's the Picture of Dorian Gray or the Importance of Being Earnest - Wilde never stops throwing subversive witticisms at you, all while telling stories both comical and tragic. Really, all goths imagine that they sound like Wilde when they're trying to be catty and aristocratic. Unfortunately, so many of us fall short and just come out bitchy and self-important. H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)
Providing the link between Poe's tales of passionate despair and madness and the modern horror genre, Howard Phillips Lovecraft is the master of nihilistic and existential terror. Under-appreciated in his time and with much of his work constrained by questionable copyright claims (seriously, it's a fucking labyrinthine tale), it's only been in the past few decades that Lovecraft's work has truly begun to spread through the masses.
Lovecraft's work is best known for the absolute horror engendered by being faced with a vicious and uncaring universe fraught with things mankind cannot comprehend without going mad in the process. Aleister Crowley (1875-1947)
The Great Beast, himself. While many know the some of the more scandalous bits and pieces about Crowley, few do the research to learn that he was also a world-renowned chess player, a mountain climber that was among the first party to attempt to ascend K2, and a writer of poetry as well as an autobiographical fiction (Diary of a Drug Fiend).
His magical writings (upon which he founded not one, but two mystical orders, the OTO and the A.A.) also heavily influenced the formation of both modern Neo-paganism/Wicca and Anton LaVey's Church of Satan. Dracula (1897) - Bram Stoker
If you consider yourself a goth kid and haven't read this book, go do it. RIGHT NOW.
Seriously. What's wrong with you? While it isn't the first vampire novel ever written, it is certainly the best known and most influential on the modern vampire myth. |
