It’s October, the month when in New York City we lose 77 minutes of daylight (yes, I’m counting) and the days and nights get so much colder.
In other words, it’s time to get spooked and shiver!
For Halloween this year, I’m reading one of the original gothic novels, The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe. Jane Austen fans might be familiar with this title from Northanger Abbey, whose heroine, Catherine Morland, is obsessed with it, at one point saying, “While I have Udolpho to read, I feel as if nobody could make me miserable.” So far I’ve been considerably less enchanted with the novel than Catherine is, but I’m only one-quarter of the way into it—it’s quite long!—and the characters haven’t yet arrived at the remote Italian castle named in the title. In the meantime, I’m enjoying the moody landscapes and the petty villainy of Madame Montoni, the aunt and reluctant protector of the novel’s heroine, Emily St. Aubert.
Catherine’s interest in gothic novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho was typical of the time. These novels became so popular in the late eighteenth century that their readers subsidized the new business of mass market fiction as well as the private lending libraries that made new mass-produced novels available to subscribers. And in the centuries since, the original tropes of the gothic novel—ruined architecture, innocent protagonists, depraved and egomaniacal villains—have been transformed and expanded upon in countless enthralling ways.
At BMCC’s library, you’ll find a tantalizing sampling of whatever kind of terror and horror you prefer, whether it’s centuries-old fiction or the latest graphic novel. Check out what we have in our leisure reading collection, comics and graphic novels collection, and the stacks. Don’t miss the suggestions the BMCC Reads team made a couple Halloweens ago. And for more on the history of the gothic, see “The Gothic Novel” in Critical Survey of Long Fiction (login required).
About the author Rachael Nevins is an adjunct librarian at BMCC and also a writer, voracious reader, and long-distance runner.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
