“The villa, once beloved, was better left behind in all its tragedies.” You can try to escape a family curse, but in the end the sins of your past will always find you. A young woman named Sophie becomes a reluctant witness to just this sort of Gothic reckoning in The Villa, Once Beloved by Victor Manibo, which came out back in November. I loved Victor’s debut sci-fi thriller The Sleepless, so when I heard he was writing a Gothic novel set in his homeland of the Philippines, I knew I had to check it out! The Villa, Once Beloved does a beautiful job of blending classic Gothic tropes with Filipino folklore, a suffocating tropical setting, and the region’s dark history of colonialism and political corruption. Continue reading Review of The Villa, Once Beloved—Filipino Gothic
Tag: ancestral home
Gothic Tropes in The Hound of the Baskervilles
I have written before about how detective fiction (and the mystery genre more broadly) emerged out of the Gothic. I even touched briefly on this particular book. But today I want to give a much more in-depth examination of the Gothic elements in Arthur Conan Doyle’s celebrated Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, first published in serialized form in 1901–2. Continue reading Gothic Tropes in The Hound of the Baskervilles