Gothics

While gothic novels have been around since the 18th century, beginning with Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto” in 1764, through to Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” & Daphne Du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” the mid-twentieth century saw an explosion of the genre in a distinctive mass-market paperback form. From the early 1960s through the mid-1970s they flooded drugstore racks & supermarket checkout lanes, their covers instantly recognizable: a distraught woman in a flowing nightgown fleeing a dark mansion or forbidding castle, nearly always with a single tower window glowing ominously in the night.

These paperbacks straddled the worlds of romance & horror but had a specific flavor — an intoxicating blend of mystery, fear, & suggestions of the supernatural; of old houses holding darker secrets; of the past intruding menacingly upon the present. The atmosphere was everything: ominous, claustrophobic, thick with foreboding & heightened emotion. Authors like Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, & Phyllis Whitney became household names, their novels selling in the millions to readers hungry for suspenseful tales of imperiled heroines & brooding heroes.

The quality of these gothics varied wildly, from genuinely atmospheric page-turners to formulaic potboilers, but their appeal was undeniable. The gothic flavor proved so commercially successful that publishers began slapping the iconic covers onto books that weren’t truly gothic at all. Some believe this overuse & dilution contributed to the category’s eventual decline. By the mid-1970s, gothics were facing stiff competition from historical romances that offered readers longer & more varied storylines & explicit sensuality. The 1980s saw gothics fade from prominence, & by the mid-1990s, they had vanished entirely as a distinct category in mass-market publishing. But the gothic sensibility didn’t truly die. Its elements just migrated into other subgenres: paranormal romance with werewolves, vampires, & ghosts, romantic intrigue & mysteries, “dark” romance, even some kinds of fantasy.

For years, the original vintage paperbacks were either tossed into garbage bins or they sat gathering dust in used bookstores & thrift shops, dismissed as forgettable, slightly embarrassing relics of a bygone era. But recently a growing number of collectors & readers have been rediscovering them, drawn to their evocative cover art, their campy melodrama, & their window into a specific moment in publishing history. Within just the past six years, (since around 2020), prices on the secondary market have doubled & in some cases more than tripled. Many of the books that once sold for 75 cents now command a premium.

Below is a list of resources specific to understanding & collecting twentieth-century gothics, followed by some specific noteworthy gothics from the era.

Resources

• Gothic Journal: Though the journal is no longer in print, the website still sells back issues & provides author profiles as well as other useful content
• Gothic Novels Of The Twentieth Century, by Elsa J. Radcliffe: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1979. A bibliography of almost 2000 gothic & romantic suspense novels. Radcliffe provides annotations for many of the titles & assigns them a highly subjective A-F rating. Here’s a review of it, by Justin Tate.
• The Gothic Romance Wave: A Critical History of the Mass Market Novels, 1960-1993, by Lori A. Paige: McFarland & Company, 2018. A critical exploration of gothics from the era, a review of this resource by the Journal Of Popular Romance Studies can be found here
• Vintage Gothic & Romance Novels: a highly active Facebook group where members share book reviews, covers, & recommendations

Noteworthy Gothics

• Mistress Of Mellyn, by Victora Holt. First published in 1960, this was the book that kicked off the era — the one responsible for igniting the gothic trend of the next two decades. While the first edition is a hardcover with a castle on the dust jacket, it went on to have multiple paperback reprints that included a fleeing woman on the cover.
• Saga Of The Phenwick Women, a 40-book series by Katheryn Kimbrough (John M. Kimbro). Published from the mid-70s through the early 80s, the series follows the women of the Phenwick family through multiple eras, beginning in the 1700s. Each title in the series begins with the main character’s name, followed by a postpositive adjective (“Augusta, The First”; “Jane, The Courageous”; “Margaret, The Faithful”; etc.).
• Satanic Gothic series, by multiple authors. Published by Avon in the 1970s, the approximately 12-book series, (there’s some disagreement over exact number), pushed the envelope for what was expected within the genre. With explicit occult elements, the novels veered into horror territory while still maintaining the usual gothic framework. Each of the novels in the series was originally published with a goat’s head logo on the cover. Some were reprinted later without the “Satanic Gothic” branding (“Lord Satan”, for instance). The original paperbacks are relatively rare & highly desirable to collectors, driving prices into $100–$200 territory on the secondary market.
• Gaywyck, by Vincent Virga. Published in 1980, this is considered the first gay gothic romance.