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Hammond House sits on the Tasman Peninsula, a mansion of creaky boards and wet-dog smells. Hardly the honeymoon suite, but the young wife has few options. Six months pregnant, a low bank balance, Grace accompanies her new husband, King, the co-owner of this creepy pile presuming the bedridden father-in-law ever carks it.
That’s the premise, and the premises, of Blackwater, a new release from Affirm Press, written by Melburnian Jacqueline Ross. Add a weird twin sister, a missing lodger, a convict curse, and you have the recipe of a modern Australian fright-fest.
Thing and Jenna Ortega as Wednesday in Tim Burton’s Addams Family reboot.Credit: Netflix
The book moves fast, despite the claustrophobia. Though my nagging discomfort throughout the read was less to do with moving shadows, and more the novel’s genre: Tasmanian gothic. No question, the spooky duck quacks and waddles like a spooky duck should, but how did gothic get dragged into the picture?
Like Grace, I went digging. Where the mum-to-be frets about her inheritance, I’ve been haunted all week by the genesis of Gothic. What links Wednesday Addams to Notre Dame? How did those Roman invaders get conflated with Wuthering Heights? And when did a yarn about a smelly house near Port Arthur fall under Elvira’s umbrella?
The answer lies in Germany, or at least the proto-Europe tribes that spoke a branch of the East Germanic language, way before Boris Becker swung a racquet. Camped by the Baltic, these peoples were a melange of Vandals, Burgundians and Ostrogoths. Visigoths too, who later sacked Rome in 412AD, an outrage still running deep in Italian memory.
Evidence comes 800 years later, after the Dark Ages, when gargoyles appeared on cathedrals. Buttresses began to fly, every holy window its own stained jigsaw. Welcome to the Gothic aesthetic, almost a millennium since the original Goth crew, a diaspora long since absorbed into Spain and northern Africa. So how did that misnomer occur?
Kaya Scodelario as Catherine Earnshaw in the film adapation of Wuthering Heights.
Elitism, in a word. Via the Medici artisans who later deplored the “barbarous German style”, as Renaissance architect Giorgio Vasari put it. Westminster Abbey, Cologne Cathedral – each Gothic monster was viewed as a breach of the Florentine refinement to follow, earning Gothic as a slur, the coded synonym of eyesore.
Every language has its own sarky chapter. Even Vandal, the Goth’s offsider, has been defined as a saboteur, in league with such sneers as barbarian or philistine. Just as welshing on a bet, or gypping a customer, are expressions no longer welcome in polite conversation.
Happily, the snobbery backfired in the Gothic story. Grandeur alone distinguished the style, the imposing symmetry, fast winning village sentiments. Though Henry VIII was lesser pleased, doing his best to demolish the monasteries as part of his religious reform. And from such ruins, the eeriness arose, the romance of rubble, embodied in Horace Walpole’s 1765 work, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story.
Cue the Bronte sisters, a century on, building on the groundwork of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). By this stage Gothic lost its big G, evolving into a tag for “the romantic adventures in mysterious or frightening places or situations”, as the Oxford explains. Or quoting the Macquarie’s gothic take: “stressing the bizarre, and details of a grotesque or horrible nature”.
Bram Stoker carried the flag further, Poe and Lovecraft, Daphne du Maurier and Shirley Jackson, culminating in the kooky-spooky-ooky Addams Family, emerging from the cartoon corners of The New Yorker in the late 1930s. Century by century, a movement found its margins, its own noir palette, and flourished, from old Rome all the way to creepy Tasmania.
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