What can Father Divine do when a nun confesses a disturbing secret?

Bill has always lived in his parent’s basement. Nothing 

odd about that... is there?

How can Eleanor bear watching her old love Paul, hidden as she is at the bottom of his garden?

How can Sarah’s suddenly bottomless bag be full of bees?

What can forgotten gods do? Go clubbing obviously.

The stories in this book explore secrets, doomed relationships, and madness, inspired by the sad fate of the first Mrs Rochester in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Deranged and hidden away by her husband, Mrs Rochester haunts the corridors of Thornfield Hall, and eventually destroys it.

The authors were not required to write directly about Mrs Rochester, Jane Eyre or the Brontës, but all the stories had to contain a deep, dark secret, insanity or ill-fated love.

And what a wild mix they came up with. Some of the stories in this book are fantastical and some are realistic. Some are set in the past and others are contemporary. There’s a wide mix of genres. But they all have a hint of the gothic and a tinge of strangeness.

 

Just the thing to read while hidden away in your own attic...

 

This book brings together a carefully selected range of contemporary disciplinary approaches to new areas of Gothic inquiry. Moving beyond the representational and historically based aspects of literature and film that have dominated Gothic studies, this volume both acknowledges the contemporary diversification of Gothic scholarship and maps its changing and mutating incarnations. Drawing strength from their fascinating diversity, and points of correlation, the varied perspectives and subject areas cohere around a number of core themes — of re-evaluation, discovery, and convergence — to reveal emerging trends and new directions in Gothic scholarship. Visiting fascinating areas including the Gothic and digital realities, uncanny food experiences, representations of death and the public media, Gothic creatures and their popular legacies, new approaches to contemporary Gothic literature, and re-evaluations of the Gothic mode through regional narratives, essays reveal many patterns and intersecting approaches, forcefully testifying to the multifaceted, although lucidly coherent, nature of Gothic studies in the 21^st Century. The multiple disciplines represented — from digital inquiry to food studies, from fine art to dramaturgy — engage with the Gothic in order to offer new definitions and methodological approaches to Gothic scholarship. The interdisciplinary, transnational focus of this volume provides exciting new insights into, and expanded and revitalised definitions of, the Gothic and its related fields.