Chill Quill: Gothic Romance, Pink Horror, and Reinventing Animal Tropes
Recapping BookTrib's "Chill Quill" columns.
Earlier this spring, the good folks over at BookTrib kindly gave me the opportunity to pen my own bi-monthly column “geared toward horror and speculative fiction fans.” Since the column launched in February 2024, I’ve published six issues of The Chill Quill, covering everything from gothic romance, to this year’s Bram Stoker Awards® nominees, to reinventing animal tropes in the genre.
While May’s columns will start coming in full to you via Substack syndication, here’s a sampling of the pieces published thus far:
Romancing the Gothic
Characterized by dark atmospheres, grotesque characters and events, and powerful emotions that blur the line between love and hate, Gothic fiction has flourished since the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto in 1764. Widely regarded as the novel that established the genre, Otranto introduced what would become the definitive tropes of the Gothic fiction — creepy castles, cursed families, and a reliance on gloomy, foreboding ambiance — but it was Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance, published in 1790, that birthed the subgenre of Gothic romance.
But what is it about Gothic that is so romantic anyway? There are, of course, the romantic settings and stock devices — ruined abbeys, crumbling castles, and the like — and the use of gloomy, desolate, or otherwise foreboding atmospheres for psychological effect. But it’s the immersion in extraordinary worlds and moral ambiguity that often fans the flame of fated Gothic romances. In these dark, emotional stories, love functions the same as any passion; it drives characters to extreme behaviors — from hysteria to remorseless, to consumption and despair. In this way, love is a powerful potion. It bubbles over the story, often becoming its failure point — or its triumph. After all, what is scarier than falling in love, anyway?
Read the full column, featuring Gwendolyn Kiste and Cassondra Windwalker here.
Pretty, Pink, and Poisonous: The “Pink Horror” Era
Aerosmith frontman Stephen Tyler may have sung, “Pink, it’s my new obsession” back in the glory days of late-90s rock, but it wasn’t until the early 2020s that the horror genre fell in love with pink — and, with the success of 2023’s Barbie that put Pantone 219C front and center in the current color culture collective, it’s unlikely that the trend will end any time soon.
When it comes to pink in horror, though, like Australia’s famous “pink lake” Lake Hillier—safe to swim in but inadvisable to drink — the tide is just starting to rise, and there are not one but two beautiful pink waves washing through the literary landscape today: the works referred to in the subgenre now called “pink horror” and all the absolutely breathtaking pink book covers flooding the subgenre.
Read the full column, featuring Mona Awad, Rachel Harrison, Sarah Gailey, Tiffany Meuret, and cover artist Katie Klim (who designed Bless Your Heart’s UK book cover for Solaris Books) here.
Reinventing Animal Tropes In Horror Novels
“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” asks Percy Bysshe Shelley in “Ode to the West Wind.” Warming wind and pretty colors aside, nothing quite says spring like all the baby animals. My neighbors welcomed fledglings in the holiday wreath still hung on their front door. A mama squirrel is teaching her kits the ropes in the backyard sweetgums. Last week, someone kindly delivered home a wayward turtle that took a wrong turn out of its pond and got lost in the grass. If it’s not the sunshine casting a golden glow over everything, it’s the pollen. Soon, we’ll submit to our cicada overloads when not one, but two, broods emerge from their underground labyrinths.
No matter how much we love our feathered, finned, and furry friends, perhaps is no horror trope more common — and more controversial — than its treatment of animals. From Pet Semetery to Jaws, animal violence has long been a staple of the genre, and while it’s unlikely that animals will disappear from the page any time soon, contemporary horror is giving agency to animals in new and novel ways, putting a shining star on a new breed of animal protagonists.
Read the full column, featuring Grady Hendrix, Josh Malerman, Mona Awad, Catriona Ward, and Kira Jane Buxton here.
Want to keep reading? Enjoy “The Chill Quill” here.