Our celebratation of the spooky season continues today with this perfect guest post from Jennifer Kennedy, celebrating her love for the Gothic. We’re excited to be taking part in Angry Robot’s blog tour for Jennifer’s own Gothic novel, OUR GIFTED HEARTS – which is out today!

Before we hand you over to Jennifer, let’s find out more about Our Gifted Hearts:

Fortune Blyth suffered the loss of a secret child when she was sixteen and vowed never to let another man touch her.

Ten years later she is content living a spinster life with her Ma and beloved birds.

But when witch hunters come to town, it isn’t long before fingers are pointed her way, and Fortune is forced to choose – stay and hang, or marry a relative stranger and escape.

She chooses marriage.

But her husband’s island residence is not the safe haven she was promised, reachable only by boat and housing both a surly housekeeper and eccentric mother-in-law.

What’s more, there are secrets lurking in the shadows of the house, and Fortune is about to discover there are some things worse than death.

Perhaps she would have been better off hanging after all.

 

Our Gifted Hearts is out today from Angry Robot – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org

My Undying Love for the Gothic

by Jennifer Kennedy

One of the hardest questions to answer as a gothic author is ‘What is it about the gothic genre that appeals to you?’ It is usually met with me stumbling and blurting out words and phrases like ‘fear, loneliness, a longing for connection, empowerment, control’ in no particular order. So let me try and answer that question a bit more succinctly today. 

My first memories of reading novels as a seven or eight-year-old started with devouring A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson-Burnett. And I believe that this is where my love for the gothic started. But… A Little Princess isn’t a gothic novel I hear you say? Not technically, no. But the seeds were there. A girl abandoned and alone, thrust into poverty, stripped of her possessions and forced to live in an attic – sounds pretty gothic to me. Not to mention the yearning for her old life and her beloved father. It is heartbreaking. And it stayed with me. 

That seed, the loss and the yearning, appeared in many gothic novels I read as I got older, culminating in my favourite of them all: Wuthering Heights. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. Reading Wuthering Heights as an impressionable teenager had a profound effect on me. I memorised my favourite passages and went into the relationships with a messed up idea of what love looked like. As a city girl, the vast, wild space of the moors was enticing, freeing even. And then there is the ghost of Catherine. The idea that love surpasses the physical and we pay for our choices beyond death was fascinating. I’m excited to see how the new Emerald Fennell film has interpreted the novel.

The theme of our past coming back to haunt us, or the ghosts of the past actually haunting us runs deep in the gothic. It can happen on the physical plane (Jane Eyre, Frankenstein) or the metaphysical (The Haunting of Hill House, The Woman in Black).  

In Our Gifted Hearts, the protagonist, Fortune, has chosen to repress her emotions about a tragedy in her past. She’s also in denial about a supernatural gift she has been given. It is only when she is put in a situation that forces her to acknowledge it that she begins to truly heal and accept herself. The theme of self-acceptance, or empowerment, is close to my heart and a character coming to realise their destiny is one of my favourite tropes. Dr Frankenstein has to own up to what he has done and accept the consequences, Dorian Gray must face his own tortured soul, and Catherine and Heathcliff find peace rotting in the ground. So it is no surprise that Fortune will not surrender to her oppressors. She will take matters into her own hands in order to fulfil her own destiny. 

One of my favourite gothic tropes has to be the houses. Perhaps this is something which stuck from the birth of gothic fiction in The Castle of Otranto, and I’m so glad it did. Old, crumbling castles, mansions, or houses are a staple. They hold histories and secrets, hidden rooms and passages, as well as ghosts! The thought of getting lost in an ancient, giant castle whilst unearthing its secrets fills me with joy. The Haunting of Hill House immediately springs to mind, and all its on-screen adaptations. Even The Haunting (1999) is a guilty pleasure of mine. The scene where Eleanor and Theodora skip through a number of bizarre rooms gives me a warm glow. Edward Scissorhands’ dilapidated mansion on the hill is forever seared on my mind. Thornfield Hall is a huge house with many unused rooms and secrets in the attic of course! Wuthering Heights, Northanger Abbey, the House of Usher. I could talk all day about these and the qualities they bring to their stories. These houses are a character in themselves. 

It is no surprise then that an old, isolated mansion was a must for Our Gifted Hearts. I hope I have done the house justice in portraying its presence and effect on the characters. The dark corridors, secret places, and the shadows where ghosts can dwell, are essential to creating the creeping atmosphere at the heart of the novel.

This leads perfectly into another necessary trope for gothic fiction: Isolation. Not only are the characters isolated (I’ll talk more about that in a moment) but the settings usually are too. As I mentioned earlier, the rambling moors of Wuthering Heights – the sense of wilderness and isolation is imperative to the novel. Their nearest neighbour is miles away in Thrushcross Grange. Thornfield Hall is surrounded by countryside, Jane almost dies before happening upon another house. Michelle Paver books are an excellent example of the setting as a character, even the antagonist. Whether trapped on the ice in the Arctic, or taking a perilous journey up a mountain, the characters are surviving in spite of their surroundings. My love for this type of isolated setting spills into my other favourite genres too, horror and Sci-Fi. People look at me strange when I tell them my comfort films are Alien and The Thing.

Fortune is similarly facing a battle against her setting in Our Gifted Hearts; an isolated island. There is literally nowhere for her to run. But she also finds peace and comfort in the natural beauty of the landscape. 

Isolated characters can be used in any setting, but they complement each other well in the gothic genre. Dr Frankenstein is a recluse, completely focused on his work, ignoring the pleas of his family. Dorian Gray and Dr Jekyll are harbouring terrible secrets that keeps them from others. Characters feel isolated because of their beliefs or their social standing. They are shunned or belittled for seeing things others don’t, or are afraid to share their unusual, dark gifts. ‘I see dead people,’ anyone?

There is something truly magical about the gothic. It pulls you into another world where our shadow selves have a voice. Where our inner fears become external impressions to be bargained or battled with. Where our longing for something lost can be found.   

Ultimately, there are many many reasons why I’m drawn to the gothic genre, more than I have had time to talk about here. Some reasons are buried so deep inside me that I find it hard to even articulate them. Maybe Cathy expressed it best when she cried ‘I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free.’   

I have poured that sense of loss and longing into Our Gifted Hearts and sent it out into the wilds to be judged. Liberation or madness? It is yet to be decided! Either way, this novel is my love-letter to the gothic, and I hope it brings you warmth on an autumnal night, or a sense of empowerment in a dark time, or at the very least scratches a deep unsettling itch right in the centre of your heart.  

Our Gifted Hearts is out today from Angry Robot – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org

Jennifer Kennedy is a gothic horror author from the North West of England. Her short stories and flash fiction have been published in various magazines and anthologies. When she isn’t writing she dreams of living in a haunted castle on the moors. Until then, she is content in her tiny house with her son and their extremely black cat.

She is represented by Hannah Sheppard. Our Gifted Hearts is her first novel, published by Angry Robot.

You can find Jennifer on Substack, Instagram, Threads, and Facebook. But mostly on Instagram.