The Gothic Is a Gateway to Literature’s Most Enduring Themes

The Gothic is a genre with recognizable tropes: witches and vampires, haunted houses and cobwebby tombs. It’s eerie, it’s morbid, it’s campy and over the top. When I was writing my novel Immersions, based on the fairy tale “Bluebeard,” I wanted to write into this Gothic tradition, so I included a big creepy house, a mysterious older man, and a sister who disappeared.

In early drafts, I kept escalating these elements, ...