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Trystan uses her home as an example of how to goth-up decor, with photographs on her site. And much like her idol, the Gothic Martha Stew-art suggests: "Don't bother with what's trendy, and don't care what other people think. Life's too short for that nonsense. Stick to what you love and you'll never go wrong—that's my advice to anyone, goth or not."
Edemonium, in Paris, is run by Barbara Perrier. The shop, nestled in the home of gargoyles and Euro dragons, is located in a sixteenth-century building composed of stone walls with iron bars at the windows, a cast-iron porch, and columns and moldings throughout the interior. "It is an intem-poral and peaceful atmosphere," Barbara says of the three-year-old shop.
An artist herself, Barbara likes to feature macabre work by artists and designers. The majority of her customers are goths. "This is a place where people come who want to decorate their interior, even to have specific pieces made for that purpose." The worst part of owning the shop is the ordinary people who stumble in "and think I'm a witch!"
The four-year-old online shop Dark Reflections Designs specializes in black mirrors, scrying mirrors, coffin frames, coffin boxes, and cast items. Owner Micah Medway had worked as a custom picture framer for seven years. "One time I had a coffin-shaped Bauhaus poster, from the New Orleans reunion show. I built a coffin-shaped frame for it, and some friends wanted me to build them one . . . The business blossomed from there."
Everything sold at Dark Reflections Designs is handmade by Micah, whose clientele is split between goths and Pagans. Her most unusual item is the coffin clock, which she makes in Hollywood, where she creates all her designs, "in the guesthouse I built with my landlord in the backyard!"
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wicked
Eating, even among the cadaverously lean, is fun. Dinner parties are de rigueur in the goth world. Setting a mood with a bloodred brocaded tablecloth, silver candelabra with twenty-four-inch black tapers, frankincense wafting through the air, Dead Can Dance oozing from the CD player, and coffin-handle napkin holders contribute to the ambience that turns a goth meal into a soiree.
The \ Section offers a few unusual gothish food suggestions, from the plebeian to the exotic:
Azazelle: "Shaved black truffle with white asparagus, fugu, ancient red wine with dust and cobwebs from the cellar still on the bottle!"

Cemetery Crow: "Everything I serve is dead anyway. How about a black caviar, gray aspic in my brain mold, Forbidden Rice from Thailand [which is black], blackberries, and bloodred Vampire Wine."
Madame X: "Call of Cthulhu calamari, Heart's Desire stew prepared with the heart of the beast of the chef's choice, Blackened Fungus Ole, Blood Clot strawberry Jell-O with strawberry schnapps, cranberry and grape juice, and Transylvanian Vampire Wine."
Mylucretia: "Bleeding heart cake."
Vena Cava: "Sugar skulls, red wine or cranberry juice."
Paola: "Black pasta [blackened with squid ink], black bean salad, black soy youba, a dark red Italian wine—some wines are so dark they are almost black."
A bcArsc, or A PC cruiser?
Most of The \ Section want to own a hearse. Or a PT Cruiser, the most accessible car that resembles a hearse. Richard Goulet and Claudine Ver-straelen, co-owners of the goth shop Cruella in Montreal, own both. The PT Cruiser is more practical, but the 1979 Cadillac Miller Meteor hearse is more fun although, as Richard says, "Every time I turn the key, it costs me $10 in gas!"
Taoist owns "a black PT Cruiser 2-liter limited edition with blacked-out windows and steel kickplates, and a solid pewter skull gearknob."
Jetgirl and Medea have goth friends who own a hearse, as does TankBoy, who says, "It requires constant maintenance." Gypsy is "saving up for a hearse right now!" And while Amanda doesn't own a hearse, she has driven one: "I actually picked up a 'special delivery' for a funeral home at the airport in a hearse for the funeral home I was living in at the time."
Nevermore is the only one of The f Section who actually possesses a hearse: "A black 1971 Cadillac Fleetwood M&M hearse. Doesn't run too good. Burns lots of oil, and the transmission is flaky."

Goths are overwhelmingly pet lovers. Pets can take the place of a partner or children, and they can add animation to the decor. Goths have been known to cohabit with all manner of creatures, the most common, not surprisingly, cats (although there may be more fish). The most common cat color is ... black! The favored cat breed is the exotic Sphinx—named because of its resemblance to ancient Egyptian cat sculptures. The first of these hairless mutants was born in 1966 in a Canadian litter of Rex kittens. The Sphinx, often described as the most loving of cats, has enormous ears that give it the cross-species look of a gargoyle. They are a popular breed, but being pure-breds, out of the price range of most goths.
Other animals that goths smile favorably upon are panthers, skunks, rats, and wolves, treating them with respect, viewing them as kindred spirits. Many goths find spiders and lizards fascinating, although insects per se are not high on the list of adorable creatures to share your home with.
Many Goths hold a special spot in their heart for ravens, crows, and bats.
Ravens and crows—those shiny black birds that in so many lands symbolize death—are interchangeable to most people. Both belong to the Corvidae (crow family), which includes about 100 types of birds, of which only forty or so are crows. Ravens, with an average length of twenty-four inches, are larger than crows, and have a wedge-shaped tail. The crow's tail is fan-shaped. Ravens tend to be more solitary than crows; the latter like to fly in packs called "murders." Ravens are purported by ornithologists to be the most intelligent birds on the planet, with a large, complex, and varied vocabulary of sounds they use among themselves. They can imitate almost any sound, including the human voice. Edgar Allan Poe said about ravens, "Though the birds have a wide variety of sounds and calls, they may not be willing to divulge their secrets to us."
Unfortunately ravens and crows are also harbingers of the mosquito-borne West Nile virus, since they are one of the species whose death from the virus is noticed first.
About 1,075 species of bats have been identified—the only flying mammals, and the only vertebrate animals that fly at night. Bats come in second to rats and rodents as the most diverse mammals on the earth. The two cutest bats might be the epauletted fruit bat (Epomophorus wahlbergi) of Africa, commonly called the "flying fox," weighing about three ounces, and the dog-faced Egyptian fruit bat (Rousettus aegyptiacus), which weighs in at a slightly larger three and a half ounces. Most bats eat fruit or insects—roughly one half their body weight in insects each night; without bats we would be overrun by insects. Vampire bats (Desmondus rotundas) are small—their bodies about the size of an adult thumb (two and three quarters inches long, with an eight-inch wingspan). Indiginous to the tropical and subtropical areas of the Americas, they live in colonies and are strongly bonded socially; bats that go hungry on the nightly outings are fed by their mates through a regurgitation process. They live about nine years in the wild, and up to twenty in captivity. Bats mate year round, and usually produce one offspring annually. Vampire bats can maneuver on the ground as well as in the air, and can crawl or fly side to side and backwards. They feed on the blood of animals and require about two ta-blespoons each day, which they get by making a small incision in their prey and then lapping rather than sucking the blood—anticoagulants in their saliva prevent clotting. Vampire bats need the red blood cells only, and begin excreting the plasma, which their bodies cannot utilize, before they finish dining. Like all bats, they locate their prey by smell, sound, and echolocation (analyzing echoes from sound pulses), and possibly by heat. Currently vampire bats are on the endangered species list.
keeping up ttritb the A5{umses
Goth-interest objets d'art abound, especially on eBay, that virtual memento mori ("Remember you must die!") heaven. Goths around the world can bid on human skulls, Victorian hair jewelry, antique crucifixes, rosary beads, and funeral flags from the early 1900s.
Necromance is a goth legend. Home is the store on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, which resembles a Victorian curio shop. Necromance has been in operation for a dozen years, and goths make pilgrimages to it when in Los Angeles. Nancy Smith, the owner, also sells on eBay. "I have loved skulls and skeletons, monsters and ghosts all my life. I thought it would be nice and dreary to be around this stuff all day, so I opened the store," which she describes as "the Disney Haunted Mansion meets the Natural History Museum." Besides jewelry made of animal bones and teeth, Necromance is the place to find a spider paperweight, glass eyes, or a fruit bat preserved in formaldehyde for the kitchen counter. Nancy also sells cool T-shirts, like L.A. CORONER; MOTEL 666; and the famous two-headed skeleton Necro. "There are stores that sell human bones and stores that sell Victorian mourning jewelry, and stores that sell coffins. What makes us different is we sell it all!"
Miriam Melanson of Vancouver's Flaming Angels Designs, creates much of what she stocks in her three-year-old shop. One unusual items is the "bloody cross pillow." Miriam says, "We are unique because we are product developers, not crafters or sewers. I spend countless hours devel-

Courtesy of Damien Glonek and Ed Long
oping product ideas as well as designs for these items. We don't just produce the latest version of the hottest, latest thing; we go beyond that."
Julie Pedersen, owner of Shaddow Domain Gothic Treasures in Idaho, sells items she scours the planet to find. "I do make some of my own products, and have begun production of mugs and other printables." Her most popular item is "the Devil Duckies."
Rare, expensive, one-of-a-kind antiques, for instance, mourning pins for the morbid sewer, and old morticians' embalming equipment, can be had from the online shop Gothic Rose Antiques, which operates out of Petaluma, California.
Goths have a great sense of humor, and love toys. Inkubus Art and Objects sells everything, from clothing to decor, and they have plenty of goth oddities, like Raven the Goth Girl Nodder, and the Brain Mold, for making an unusual aspic, and sugar skull molds, which can also juice up a goth high tea. Owner Malaise Lindenfeld—who recently moved her six-year-old operation from Florida to New Hampshire—also sells the artwork of Czech artist Adolf Benca. One of her most precious memories is of a young boy who used to come in to the shop and would "buy something, then stay a while and we would talk; he complained about his parents, and his life in general. I tried advising him, being a parent of a boy his age myself, so I understood what his parents felt and could explain it to him. A few months later his parents came by to thank me for being a positive influence."
IcsUt 6c £ioncourt "Never believed in marriage...well, at least not in
the Christian way. But making a pact
with someone to stay forever by her side
sounds really really romantic."
CDistress fja6es "Yes, I'd like to
get married. I'm very old-fashioned. A
reception in London Dungeon."
I have a boyfriend. I'd have like about five nine-year-olds in faerie wings for my flower girls, and I will have black rose petals."

The \ Section are overwhelmingly collectors, and it's not unusual that many collect the same things. Collectibles from Tim Burton's movie The Nightmare Before Christmas are hot. And the grimly adorable Living Dead Dolls are very popular with goths in general.
Ed Long and Damien Glonek of New Jersey began creating Living Dead Dolls five years ago. Damien says, "We never really set out to cater to goths, as our roots were planted in horror films. We just did what we wanted, and it just happens to work well in the goth community." Ed adds, "Our dolls are a lot less romantic about death. That's why I am so surprised that they are so well received in the goth community. I think it is refreshing to see that they [goths] actually have a sense of humor."
Damien and Ed licensed sales and distribution to Mezco Toyz, but continue to design all the dolls themselves and oversee production samples of the dolls and the other items they've branched into, including mini dolls, stationery, journals, barware, and the adorable Living Dead Doll pencil sharpener where, to sharpen the pencil, the doll head is stabbed in the eye.
"One of the reasons we think Living Dead Dolls have been so successful," Damien says, "is because there has never been anything like them on such a level before. And we do what we want to see and don't try to guess what the next 'it' will be." Ed says, "I think people have been waiting to see something like this for a long time, and finally someone had the guts to do it, and do it right." Damien adds, "It's great to be able to infect the world with our bit of sickness!"

French Quarter Wedding Chapel, New Orleans www.frenchquarterwedding.com
The Dark Angel www.thedarkangel.co.uk
Enigma Fashions www.enigmafashions.com
Nehelenia Designs www.nehelenia.de
Gothic Martha Stewart www.toreadors.com/martha/
cypher "We actually had a Victorian
theme wedding. Top hats, ascots,
canes-at least eighty percent of our
guests made some attempt to dress
for the theme and they're still
complimenting themselves."
DUSK "My dress was purple. Our rings are Celtic rings, in silver. We had a nice goth party. We had a honeymoon in California where we saw the whales."
Cmily Bronte "We had a Pagan
handfasting in the woods and a legal
ceremony in the Chinese tomb
at the museum."
jctgirl "Divorced now, but we had our
ceremony in a cemetery. Complete with
us coming out of the coffin that my
friend drove there in his hearse. An
Enokian priest married us and we had all
the goth accoutrements. It was filmed
and shown on Wild Chicago when we
were interviewed for the show. Also
used some of the footage in one of our
music videos. It was pretty
outrageous and cool."
"I had my wedding in a tiny little white storybook church with stained glass windows in Gothic arch shapes, with lots of tattooed, makeup-wearing, pierced-in-places-l-can't-imag-ine band members I work with in attendance. Honeymooned in St. Augustine, where there were some cool old cemeteries."