Gothic Bites 2024
Starting in 2023, I blogged on cohost about gothic fiction, and in October 2023 I posted daily short blurbs about gothic stories and poems one could read in a single sitting, a "bite sized" piece to celebrate the season.
In 2024 I began to prepare another series, only to learn cohost was shutting down on October 1. Defying anger and grief alike, I threw together several posts, putting them on cohost early and on my site afterwards -- the one before this.
So, for October 2025, I thought I should repost all these in one place, so you could consider seven tales and songs to wile away some time.
Robert Merry, Sir Roland, a Fragment, 1786
It begins as a passable pastiche of medieval Roland poems, Roland being the traditional figure to put in some sort of romantic situation involving wizards or enchanted forests. But it quickly takes a turn, with a beautiful beckoning woman who's also a rotting corpse. Shades haunt the waters they sail over. Roland seems enchanted. And the horrifying ending of both his quest and the poem sinks all.
https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/sir-roland-fragment
George Colman, the Younger, A Maid of the Moor, or the Water Fiends, 1797
By George Colman, the Younger
OK so the deal with this one is it's funny, but it can be hard to see that at first glance. It's a fairly cliched story of ghosts and evil spirits, but threaded throughout are arch jokes that honestly all kind of land.
One's racist, and unfortunately that doesn't really stop how funny it is in the context, alas. You'll know it when you get to the line about the moor -- "Moor" is an antiquated word for a Muslim person. You may have heard it in relation so Shakespeare's Othello.
The poem itself gallops along, tossing out its jokes every so often, before slamming into an ending that manages to be one more silly gag and an appropriately, if also cliched, sad ending to the tale.
Robert Browning, The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed's Church, 1845
Winner of this year's prize for "Gothic Bite most likely to have been something you read in school," Browning's "Bishop's Tomb..." is an excellent poem. It's a great example of Browning's dramatic monologue form which he loved so much. A dying bishop is ordering his many sons in exactly the way to build his lavish tomb, all to spite another man buried across the way. One wonders how the bishop has sons at all, and exactly how much money this man has, personally, if he can afford all this. And, of course, we wonder if the sons will bother at all.
It's gothic because of the visions he has, the dreadful fear of death itself lurking behind every narcissistic request. The images he conjures on his deathbed suffice, for us, as a truly gothic tomb, whether they will ever be carved and built or not.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43746/the-bishop-orders-his-tomb-at-saint-praxeds-church
Fritz Leiber, When the Change Winds Blow, 1964
Fritz Leiber was a prolific and influential science fiction and fantasy author. He's probably most famous for the Lankhmar stories, about Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, two traveling swordsmen who apprentice themselves to two rival magicians, and so they're constantly doing weird shit, getting into fights, fucking rat women (yes), and trying to give it all up.
Any of that would work for this. But here's a science fiction story he wrote, where the specters of an explorer's life keep haunting him as he flies and walks through the psychoreactive geography of an alien planet. It even has a gothic church!
https://archive.org/details/worldsoffritzlei00leib/page/n5/mode/1up
Emily Bronte, The Prisoner, 1845-6
If I have the timeline correct, this poem was published near the end of Bronte's life. It's very good, though the moral is, well, strongly-put. But then again, the gothic began with the book just telling you what the moral was on the last page, so why not? Coming as it does so close to the author's death, we might be tempted to read it as an allegory for physical life. It bears that reading, if you want to use it.
It's essentially a poetic description of a horrible prison and the woman trapped there, capped by her quiet rebuke of the punishment through her belief in the Christian God.
https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/75/poems-of-emily-bronte/5168/the-prisoner/
Washington Irving, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, 1819
I hesitated and ended up not doing this one last year, but I want to include it. But first, let me tell you why I hesitated.
You probably know this story. But you probably don't know its context. See, it's not a short story. It's a chapter of a book, titled The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon. I first read the book when I was something like 22 or 23. It's probably ended up being one of the most influential books in my life, even if I don't necessarily like it all that much. I don't dislike it either, mind you. I just don't reread it, is what I mean.
It's a book of things, of sketches, as a fictional character, the titular Crayon, travels the US and Europe and writes of what he sees and experiences. These were fairly common books to see at the time, both personal and published. Irving had a very interesting way of working with texts, something that's become kind of one of my prime ways of valuing texts. What's the reason they're books, and not movies? For a lot of people, it's because they can't afford to make a movie. But the writing is "cinematic," which often bores me personally. I want the book to be a book; I'm often fond of saying that a book should be "unfilmable," because it should be so deeply and integrally textual that moving it to a new form is pointless.
That's obviously hyperbole. The Tristram Shandy movie is excellent, though notably, it's a fake documentary about trying to make a movie out of the book. So it gets what's up.
Anyway. "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" isn't just a story, in which a guy is menaced by a ghost and it turns out the ghost isn't real, except when it is. It's a part of a travelogue, a legend Crayon hears upon visiting a small New England town and records for posterity. This, too, was common. It's how we have a lot of our folk stories and fairy tales.
And, as we now know, a lot of the Brothers Grimm stories were given to them by a single woman, and those stories often don't have precedents elsewhere. They appear to be, not folk stories, but her stories.1 And we have to face the prospect that the legend of Sleepy Hollow was just someone's story, fed to a tourist to keep him interested in spending time and money in the town.
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is a story about fooling a fool from out of town. Except it's both Ichabod Crane and Geoffrey Crayon who are being fooled.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Sketchbook_of_Geoffrey_Crayon_(1819)/The_Legend_of_Sleepy_Hollow
Charles Dickens, To Be Taken with a Grain of Salt, 1865
Dickens eventually changed the title of this story, but I'm listing it here under its original name for a couple of reasons. First, it was part of a collection titled Prescriptions, so the title is punning on medicinal use: take this with an extra additive. And, of course, it refers to an old cliche of skepticism, that one "takes it with a grain of salt" if one shouldn't believe it, take it at face value.
Dickens doesn't quite pull it off as well as James, but the whole idea of the story is that we can't quite trust what we're being told. According to the wikipedia page, which I looked at to brush up on the story after rereading it, Dickens wrote to Elizabeth Gaskell once. He said "The Old Nurse's Story" is spoiled at the end because everyone sees the ghost. This is, as we might say, missing the point because of his preconceptions about how ghost stories work. But he seems to have gone on to write this story because of it. So it wasn't all bad.
The story is about a murder trial, in which the ghost appears frequently. Only the narrator, who is the jury's foreman, can consistently see the ghost, who is of the murdered man. The ghost interferes with the trial at several points, making sure the accused is found guilty. The ending, which I won't spoil, further complicates matters, especially as it questions how time can work in preternatural situations.
Obviously the story's constant undermining of the narrator's believability is gothic, as well as, you know, a ghost. But the question of whether we can trust the ghost is a fascinating question the story opens up for us, and something gothic fiction began more and more to wonder about. If ghosts were people, well... we don't trust everyone we meet, right?
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Doctor_Marigold%27s_Prescriptions,_the_Extra_Christmas_Number_of_All_the_Year_Round/Chapter_6
you can check out this article and this other article for more on this.↩