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The world of stained glass and sculpture enjoyed a Gothic period for over two centuries, beginning around the thirteenth. Statuary up to that period had been restricted by the building that housed it, almost always a religious building. A square temple with square stone in the wall inside the temple required a traditional sculpture carved from memory right into that stone. Gothic sculptors carved their statues outside the building, then brought them into the cathedrals, which gave them more freedom to create. As opposed to the simple crosses, depictions of Christ, and alpha and omega symbols that were the subject matter of stained glass until the 1100s, Gothic stained glass emulated nature, simulating flowers, trees, and animals. To traditionalists, this was tantamount to sacrilege, and it's easy to see why. For example, a few centuries down the road, when the Italians could finally bring themselves to recognize Gothic art, they labeled it "Goth" (as in the original Goths of Europe), or crude, at least until the Italian Renaissance came along, at which point they embraced the more natural and romantic concepts if not actual Gothic designs. Much of Europe had the same reaction.
The Gothic period of visual art greatly influenced all art in the periods that followed it. The Renaissance drew heavily from Gothic sentiment.
WILLIAM BLAKE'S LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS TO REACH ART
Level 1: Blame. The lowest common denominator. Nobody takes responsibility. Everybody viciously accuses others of being the source of their problems.
Level 2: Conflict People debate openly and fairly, arguing their respective side without blaming the others. Holding onto tension without cracking.
Level 3: Love. Opposites attract Conflicts are resolved through respect and understanding.
Level 4: Ait Borne of the merging of opposites. Creation. The baby bom of an ova and a sperm, the painting or novel bursting into existence when the deadlock of two opposing ideas results in a third, creative sollution.

Before Gothic, everything was dark—that's why they called it the Dark Ages. But by the late eighteenth century, everybody had had enough straightforward logic, and wanted something to stir the emotions. Gothic brought light and ornamentation, and the public applauded it!
Literature had its turn at Gothic Revival. Romantic writers from the mid-1800s pursued themes of death, moonlight, and lost love. The wealthy and the newly emerging literate middle class devoured all those wonderful stories written during that period by writers such as Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, and Anne Radcliffe, as well as the penny dreadfuls, enormous volumes of chilling tales often serialized in newspapers. Such stories featured helpless damsels-in-distress, isolated at crumbling Gothic manors, under the control of cruel, stern, mysterious but handsome guardians. Ah, the moors on a misty full-mooned night! Wolves howling in the distance, and the crash of the tormented surf bashing against the virgin white cliffs . . . what an atmosphere of impending danger! Delicious high melodrama.
Modern Gothic romances hit their stride in the 1970s and 1980s with Harlequin—the world's largest publisher of romance novels—giving them their own line, including the famous "bodice rippers." Readers are devoted to this type of fiction.
Unguifc literature
Long dead writers:
Edgar Allan Poe's real life flies in the face of any romanticized version of viewing existence. His tale is heart-wrenching. He was a man of extraordinary talent, whose ability to create pathos with words reduces readers to immense sadness, to crippling despair, or chills them to the icy bone with dread. And yet fate seems to have decreed that he would suffer insult upon injury, and suffer greatly all of his days, and beyond (see Chapter 10).
Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809, and died in 1849. The forty years he spent on this earth were laced with torment. Given the level of internal suffering, his output was staggering; he published dozens of works of short fiction and poetry, and many philosophical essays.
The events of Poe's life can be summarized but not really felt—his despair goes beyond what most of us have lived. His mother died of tuberculosis when he was just two years old. He then lived with his foster parents
"Antubcl £ec"
(Ust SUIUA)
"Jor the moon neper beams without
bringing me creams Of the beautiful Annabel £ce; An6 the stars neper rise but
1 feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel £ee;
An6 so, all the night-tide,
1 lie donm by the si6e Of my darling, my darling, my life
an6 my bride,
)n the sepulcber there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea.

John and Frances. Frances died when he was twenty, also of TB. When John died five years later, leaving an estate valued at three quarters of a million (mid-1800s) dollars, he bequeathed Edgar Allan not a dime, relegating him to poverty. Poe married his first cousin Virginia, whom he deeply adored. Seven years later his beloved began to cough up blood, and she, too, quickly succumbed to TB. Her death crushed his spirit and he plunged into alcoholism and spiraling despair. If ever a man was born with a dark star above his head, it was Edgar Allan Poe.
One of Poe's most evocative poems is "Annabel Lee," published in 1849, the year of his demise. It speaks of a love so deep that death itself cannot break the spell of that passion, which resides in the one who remains, a theme that resonates with most goths, for whom love is crucial. Poe's love of Virginia forced him to face the finality of her death, and perhaps hastened his own.
Poe's work is widely known and translated. Many of his stories have been turned into movies, some from the 1970s and 1980s starring that delightfully macabre personality, the late, great actor Vincent Price.
But Poe's best-known work is, of course, his evocative poem, "The Raven," published in 1845, four years before his death. It is a poem that allows this darkest of all winged creatures to personify the madness and portend the death that lingers but a hairsbreadth away from us all.

"ENIVREY-VOUS" (Get Drunk) from Les Petits Poemes en Prose
by Charles Baudelaire, translation by Cam Soles
It is essential to be drunk all the time. That's it! The great imperative! To avoid feeling the appalling weight of Time breaking your shoulders, bending you to the ground, get drunk and stay that way. But on what? On wine, poetry, goodness, please yourself. But get drunk. And if now and then you wake up on the steps of a palace, on the green grass of a ditch, in the gloomy loneliness of your own room, your drunken state gone or disappearing, ask the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, the clock, ask everything that runs by, everything that groans or rolls or sings, everything that speaks, ask what time it is; and the wind, the waves, the stars, the birds, the clock will answer you: "It's time to get drunk! Don't be martyred slaves to Time, get drunk! Endlessly drunk! On wine, virtue, poetry, please yourself!"
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Death is An angel whose
magnetic palms bring breams of ccsucy an6
slumberous calms
to smooth the beos of poor ano
nakeo men
— Charles Bauoelairc
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) is another goth favorite. Poet, essayist, and literary and art critic, his best-known collection is Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil), considered the most infamous book of poetry in French literature. During his lifetime, Baudelaire was charged with offenses to religion and public morality for thirteen of the 100 poems in that collection. The court ordered that six poems be removed from the book on the grounds of obscenity. In an age filled with rules and regulations of conduct, with the main emphasis on preparation in this life for the next by way of the Church, Baudelaire reflected the budding individualism that would emerge fully some 100 years after his demise. Much of his poetry reveals a deep introspective search for God, but it seems he was unable to find any religious belief system to sustain him. In some circles his name is still synonymous with depravity, morbidity, and obscenity.
When he discovered Poe, Baudelaire felt the two had an almost preternatural connection. He became obsessed with the American and, two years before Poe's death, began translating his work into French. These translations would provide Baudelaire with a steady source of income throughout his life. He also translated sections of British essayist Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.
Baudelaire fell from wealth to financial disaster. For much of his life he was emotionally and financially dependent on his mother. After he was expelled from college, he spent time in Paris's Latin Quarter, frittering away his inheritance in two years and racking up huge debts that would hang over him until he died. A habitual smoker of hashish and opium, he also regularly drank absinthe. His poem "Enivrey-vous" ("Get Drunk") expresses his licentious philosophy, and is a cleverly worded sarcasm aimed at Parisian politically correct society of the day.
Moods of isolation and despair tormented Baudelaire: he termed them his "moods of spleen." The love of his life was a mulatto woman named Jeanne Duvan, with whom he was obsessed for twenty years, and who inspired some of his most anguished and sensual love poetry. He died embittered at age forty-six of venereal disease, leaving a body of work that at the time of his demise was mostly unpublished, his contribution to literature ignored. It is only upon his death that the world began to recognize Baudelaire as one of the great French poets of the nineteenth century. Above his burial site at Cimetiere du Montparnasse in Paris is a sculpture of Baudelaire, looking down on and contemplating his own grave.

"Les Litanies de Satan " is one of Baudelaire's most dramatic and best-known verses. Scandalous in its day, the stanzas sing the praises of the Prince of Darkness, with the repetitive chant: Satan, have mercy on my long distress!
In 1982, Diamanda Galas released her first album, The Litanies of Satan. The Canadian goth band Masochistic Religion has a CD titled The Litanies of Satan, dedicated to Baudelaire and putting his text to music.
Poe and Baudelaire are writers who led lives of not-so-quiet desperation. Consequently it is not surprising that another author goths appreciate is the witty and pithy Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900), whose homosexual love—particularly an affair with a young aristocrat— clashed sharply with the values of Victorian England and landed him in jail, breaking his spirit.
Oscar Wilde left us many gems, and more than one goth can no doubt relate to this one: "I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read."
Other dead writers popular among goths are: Emily Bronte, Charles Brockden Brown, Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Bronte, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Marquis de Sade, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickin-son, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Donne, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Lord Dunsany, Sheridan le Fanu, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Henry James, Franz Kafka, John Keats, Guy de Maupassant, John Milton, Frederich Nietzsche, William Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Algernon Swinburne, Ugo Tarchetti, and Sir Robert Walpole. Dante Alighieri and his levels of Hell receives an honorable mention.
Recently dead writers:
Perhaps no other late writer of darkly strange fiction has had the impact of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. His short stories reflect his strange interior worlds, just behind the seam that divides reality, where powerful, demonic beings dwell, gods of darkness eager to enter the realm of the living and engulf us.
Lovecraft, born August 20, 1890, was a precocious child, reciting poetry at the age of two, reading at three, and writing by the time he was six years old. At the age of sixteen he penned regular columns on astronomy for various newspapers. But he was a lonely boy, moody, often suffering illnesses with a psychological basis. His father died of paresis, a neu
rosyphilis. An unhealthy relationship with his mother contributed to his loneliness.
It was his grandfather who introduced him to weird Gothic tales. His grandfather died when H.P. was fourteen and soon afterward mismanagement plunged the family into financial difficulties, resulting in the loss of the family home. Lovecraft contemplated suicide; he suffered a nervous breakdown that left him unable to graduate from high school. He became a hermit, studying astronomy and writing poetry, and reading old pulp magazines with their lurid horror fiction. Eventually he began to write stories of madness and death.
Three years after his mother's death in 1921, he met and married Sonia Haft Greene, who owned a hat shop on New York's Fifth Avenue. But the hat shop went bankrupt. Then Lovecraft turned down a good job editing a pulp magazine. Finally, Sonia's health forced her into a sanitarium. At thirty-four, with no job experience, H.P. could not find work. He lived alone, and became depressed, writing even bleaker fiction. In 1929 his marriage ended in divorce, and he moved back to Providence.
Ironically, toward the end of his life things improved for a while. He traveled a lot, and he had acquired a number of good friends through correspondence. He nurtured the careers of several young writers who enjoyed fame if not fortune, in particular Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch, author of the classic Psycho. But the final three years of his life returned him to extreme financial hardship—his writing had altered and became unsalable. He also suffered from cancer of the intestines, which eventually killed him.
It was only after his death that his work was collected by friends into book form. The publishing company Arkham House was set up specifically to bring the work of H.P. Lovecraft to the world. He died March 15, 1937 at the age of forty-six, and is buried in the cemetery at Swan Point, Providence, Rhode Island.
Taoist sums up Lovecraft's goth appeal: "He created an entire mythos which he brought to life in immense detail. I love the way he builds up the sense of impending doom and the way he uses madness as a tool to unsettle the reader."
Other recently dead writers that goths enjoy include: William Burroughs, Edward Gorey, Anton Lavey, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and J.R.R. Tolkein.

Undead writers:
Not all of Anne Rice's readers are goth, but all goths, it seems, have read A.ime "Rice. Y^atherine "Rams\and, friend and biographer of A.nne TVice, says this about the author's popularity:
"Interview with the Vampire tapped into unspoken social archetypes about secrecy, need, angst, and the desire to have an open alternative lifestyle that captured a large audience right away. Then it was nine years before she offered the seguel, The Vampire Lestat, and that brought her audience back. However, it was a very different type of book, more of a story than a metaphor, and people were now used to her breakthrough concept of doing everything from the vampire's point of view. They knew her characters and wanted more. She wasn't the first to do so, but she did so with the largest audience."
Underground queen Poppy Z. Brite holds just about the same cache as Anne Rice with goth readers. Poppy penned many exquisitely written short stories before bursting to prominence with her spectatular first novel Lost Souls, a kind of modern underground culture, gay vampire musical road trip. She followed this up with two more novels of modern macabre, Drawing Blood and Exquisite Corpse.
Poppy Z. Brite (her birth name) says, "You know, technically I'm not sure I have [ever considered herself goth]. Back in my late teens and early twenties, I had never heard the term 'goth'—the phrase we used was 'deathrocker' or sometimes just 'deather.' Even if you concede that it's essentially the same thing, I always felt like more of an observer than a participant in the subculture—I didn't have a group of friends who dressed the way I did or listened to the same music. By the time I knew what a goth was, and certainly by the time I had goth fans, I'd probably lost touch with too much of the scene to qualify as one."
Regardless of whether or not she is goth, Poppy's work touches goths in a special way. "I think I've written a few things that show a knowledge of the subculture without co-opting it or pandering to it. As I say, I don't know that I was ever really a part of any goth scene, but I've certainly been closer to it than some authors who try to write about it because they think it's spooky, edgy, or whatever. I think that sort of silliness reached its apex with an article that appeared in the HWA [Horror Writers Association] newsletter—'How to Write Goth Characters,' seemingly for people who'd never met a goth or wanted to. I can't imagine why anyone would
wish to write about a subculture they felt no personal attraction to, but unfortunately it has happened."
It is Lost Souls, which Poppy published at the age of twenty-five, that strikes a chord with most goths. But she admits, "Trust me, there are plenty of people who don't like Lost Souls. If you don't believe it, just check out the Amazon.com reader reviews. Gauntlet Press just published a tenth-anniversary edition of the novel."
Poppy has this to say in her forward to the recent limited-edition reprint: "I'm attempting here to put Lost Souls to bed. I don't want to bury it entirely, because every writer likes to think his work will stay in print and continue to be read for as long as possible. But I'd also like my readers to accompany me as I move on to other things. The publication of this limited edition happens to mark the end of an era for me. Between 1992 and 1999 I published four novels, all of which are pretty deeply rooted in the horror genre. I spent 2000 and 2001 writing two novels [The Value ofX and Liquor] which cannot be called horror by any stretch of the imagination, and that seems to be the direction in which I'm continuing to move. I have no idea whether these novels will be as well received as my horror work, but as I've tried to explain many times, I don't really have a choice in the matter. The one thing I've always felt 100 percent sure of is that the work won't be any good unless I follow my own obsessions, rather than attempting to 'write to market.' "
Poppy's fierce individuality as a human being and as a writer are attractive to goths. She discusses a situation that gives tremendous insight into the values of this unique spirit. "A couple of years ago I published a book called Plastic Jesus. As I often do with new releases, I auctioned off a few of the advance reading copies on eBay. One of the purchasers made a special request: He wanted me to inscribe it 'Death is easy,' the twins' song-chant from chapters four and thirty-one of Lost Souls. He said this phrase had special meaning to him, and he hoped I would write it in his book along with my autograph. I agonized over this for days. I bothered my husband and my friends: 'What if he's, like, dying of AIDS? What if he just wants a little false comfort and I refuse to give it to him? Okay, even if he's not dying, he just paid seventy-five dollars for this book; maybe I'm an asshole for not writing anything he wants in it.' Ultimately, though, I could not do it. I would have had no problem inscribing a copy of Lost Souls in such a way, but I could not make myself write those
words in Plastic Jesus. Between the writing of the two books I had learned that death is not easy; it's hard. Hard for the person doing the dying, hard for the people who must watch and stay behind. That's part of what Plastic Jesus is about: the first scene has a character dying messily and in extreme pain, and many of the subsequent scenes are about the way his life and death affected those around him. Death can be quick; death can be merciful; but I no longer believe that there is anything easy about it. I e-mailed the young man and explained all this, offering to let him rescind his bid if he wished. He was very gracious about it, telling me to inscribe his book any way I liked, but I could not have changed my mind no matter how he had reacted. Probably I made far too much of this, but it did make me feel as though I'd come a long way and gotten a lot older since I wrote Lost Souls. My husband, whom I've been with for thirteen years and who lives with my characters nearly as intimately as I do, never knew Steve and Ghost and the others as well as he knows my more recent characters; I was almost finished with them by the time we met. I no longer • live in the American South (some people think Louisiana is part of the American South, but those of us who live here know it's really a Third World country that has more in common with the Caribbean than with any part of the United States). I no longer listen to any of the music I so cherished in this story, with the exception of Tom Waits—it's great music, but evocative to the point of qualifying as time travel, which I hardly ever wish to engage in. I don't drink Chartreuse or spend a lot of time in the French Quarter. I don't think death is easy."
modern gotbic writers on tbdr Art
Sephera Giron, a goth, and a writer with several horror novels to her credit, talks with the top-four goth writers in the world about being goth, and about their work.
Storm Constantine is an award-winning goth favorite. She lives in Great Britain and has been publishing novels, short stories, and collections since the mid-1980s. Her popular novels are richly textured in the language of the fantastic. Her most recent novel is The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure (Book 1 of the Wraeththu Chronicles).
Caitlin Kiernan, born in Ireland, now living in the United States, burst onto the book world in the late 1990s. Her debut novel, Silk, set in the goth subculture, was a wild success, and she has written both fiction and
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comic books, including The Dreaming. Currently she is working on a new novel, Low Red Moon.
Nancy Kilpatrick, born in the United States, now living in Canada, has published twenty-six books since the early 1990s, including novels, collections, and anthologies she has edited. Her popular contemporary Power of the Blood vampire world has a large goth following. Her most recent work of fiction is the horror novel Eternal City.
Freda Warrington lives in England. She has been publishing novels rich in language, imagery, and history since the mid-1980s, and has a large goth fan club. She has just finished the novel The Court of the Midnight King, based on Richard III, for Earthlight.
Sephera asks: "Do you consider yourself goth?"
Storm: "It's tempting to say [I've been goth] 'all my life'—as I've always been into the dark and mysterious side of things, with a penchant for exotic clothes and magic. However, from a cultural point of view I evolved from being a Punk into being a goth at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s. In the UK, goth evolved from something that was called 'Positive Punk.' I'm still not sure why it was called that, but it was when bands like Bauhaus and Killing Joke started bringing out 'darker' music and the look people adopted had a certain—shall we say—voodoo ambience! I was always involved with bands, though not as a musician. I was an artist or designer before I became seriously involved in writing, and I used to design cassette covers and posters for bands."
Caitlin: "I didn't actually encounter the 'g'-word until college, about ten or eleven years ago, but, even then, it was really not much more than a comfortable label for a way that I'd felt and dressed and thought since high school. And the discovery that there were a lot of like-minded people, that was an important part for me. Discovering that there were entire genres of music focusing on similar aesthetic concerns, that was really wonderful."
Nancy: "I think I awoke one day to find myself goth in the early 1990s, this out of what I have always been—a dark, alienated soul, struggling to find my way. It seems a kind of movement developed while I was napping where others like me came out of the woodwork. People began to call me goth, I began to answer yes to the question: Are you? I've worn black most of my life, always visited cemeteries wherever I went, and have had a love of moody and tormented literature, film, and music. I've been nothing less than thrilled to find others such as myself."
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Freda: "I'm not a hard-line goth . . . more towards the Pre-Raphaelite end of the spectrum! I'm not sure, it kind of evolved in the early nineties from my customary long red hair and velvety clothes to something darker. The first time I took a deep breath and dyed my hair black, I realized it actually suited me!"
Sephera: "Who or what has inspired your writing?"
Storm: "I think, for me, it was a happy coincidence that a youth culture arose that so closely reflected my own worldview. For most people, I expect, the 'symbols' of goth were more of a fashion statement than anything else, but over the years I've noticed that people who've stuck with it as a movement have mostly ventured into Pagan territory. Most goths I meet are into magic or some form of alternative spirituality. This certainly wasn't there in the beginning, although one thing that identified goth (and I think was carried over from Punk) was that everyone was into being creative. If you weren't in a band, you were an artist, or a writer. The art might simply have been how you adorned your own body, and there were some very flamboyant examples out there! This whole scene influenced my early books, in particular the Wraeththu trilogy, which was greatly inspired by what I saw around me. Looking back, I'm really grateful I was young during those early goth years, because nowadays it appears to be a much more exclusive or fringe movement. I know it is still thriving, but at one time, it seemed that everyone was into it. Then, of course, the Dance culture took over and the part-timers moved on. No doubt modern kids into Dance think it's just as great as I thought our scene was, but to me the rave scene is impoverished by comparison. That's probably just my age showing!"
Caitlin: "I wouldn't say that I think anyone's ever born into goth. It's something I discovered within myself, a cumulative product of environment, various morbid curiosities, and antiquarianisms that unfolded as the years went by. I became fascinated with fantasy, especially dark fantasy, and weird fiction as a teenager, and that helped feed these fascinations. The trappings and ceremonies of Catholicism were also probably a factor, as was my family's belief in ghosts and hauntings. The veil that a lot of people seem determined to keep drawn between the rational and the irrational was very thin when I was a child, and sometimes it was brushed aside altogether."
Nancy: "I've always been quiet, a loner, struggling to make connections to people, generally stunned by the amount of useless babble and noise

around me, and the shallow realm that the masses seem to prefer to live in and from which they relate. I've naturally been attracted to the fringes, where there's a chance to breathe. I remember being taken to an actual leftover beatnik coffeehouse in Philadelphia called the Artists' Hut when I was a kid and longing to be part of that exotic black-clad world which, by the time I was old enough to go to a club on my own, had dissolved into a psychedelic paradise—which was all right because that's where I first heard the Doors singing "The End." That darkness which inspired me is to me the precursor of goth, although it took a while for the outfits to move towards the shroud-like and Victorian attire I favor."
Freda: "I've always been allergic to the mainstream and liked the more alternative, underground, mysterious side of life, in literature, music, art, and everything. When I was at school in the seventies my friends and I loathed the ghastly pop of that era. We were into Alice Cooper and David Bowie! And I've loved the Hammer films and vampire and ghost stories since I was a child. These have obviously helped shape the imaginative landscape of my writing. A Taste of Blood Wine evolved from my longing to write a vampire novel in which the vampire (Karl) did not end up being staked, and in which his 'victim' (Charlotte) evolved from being victim to lover; actually passed through the vale of danger and came to know this perilous creature intimately. To do so, Charlotte has to make some terrifying and amoral choices. Fascinating ground that novels such as Dracula tended to shy away from, keeping things within a conventional Christian framework. The erotic subtext is there but very repressed. This was the sort of thing that Gothic literature led me to want to explore. To shine a light onto those dark things in the cobwebs!"
Sephera: "All writers face obstacles, but being goth and being a writer must have presented special problems."
Storm: "Being goth has presented certain difficulties for me over the years. In particular, I felt that my appearance didn't go down too well in the established SF/fantasy scene when I first got published and started going to conventions, etc. For the most part, this was no doubt due to misunderstanding, but I do believe that some people didn't take me seriously and probably still don't! For all its technical flaws (so easy to see fifteen years on), I'm aware that the original Wraeththu novel, Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit did break ground when it came out. In 1987, (when it was first published in the UK), few writers had addressed issues of gender and
sexuality in fantasy/SF fiction. There were a few notable exceptions, but on the whole it was a fairly prim scene. I don't think my first publishers knew quite how to promote me, so as a consequence—didn't."
Caitll'n: "Yes, I think being goth has made things much more difficult at times. I'm not going to spend a lot of time bellyaching about success, because I think I've done so much better than I ever thought I would. But I know it has kept me at arm's length from a lot of readers, very close-minded people who see my byline and say, 'Oh no, not Caitlin Kiernan. Not that goth. How can anyone take that darkety-dark drivel seriously?' It's very difficult knowing that you're being judged a priori, the way people in the past have dismissed black writers and women writers, Jewish writers and gay writers. This was a big problem with The Dreaming, one that came as a surprise since one reason I was offered the gig in the first place was because I was goth. I'm very proud of most of my work on the series, as well as the work I continue to do for Vertigo, but I've had to deal with a lot of criticism that amounted to no more than people complaining about 'sissy goths' and stories that were 'too dark.' "
Nancy: "I think it's difficult just being alive, and if you add any extremism onto that, well, there are even more problems in your life. Following the rules almost always gets people the superficial rewards. If you are not born middle-class or wealthy, as I was not, if you have a penchant for darkness instead of light, as I do, if you are compelled to be a writer in a world where thought-provoking and emotional writing is considered barely tolerable and an unnecessary evil, well, you're going to have a rough time of it, as I have had. It's been a struggle, writing about darkness, being considered amoral in many ways because frequently I take the position of not judging my characters, which makes them seem immoral to the mainstream."
Freda: "Not at all, I never even thought about it! I'm just me. It's interesting though that developing a stronger, more gothic image has helped my public profile as a writer. I'm not the sort of person anyone would look at twice in everyday life, but by 'gothing up' I can make people look at me and remember me. I can turn their attention on or off according to the way I'm dressed. Gosh, it's only clothes and makeup, but it gives me a little bit of power I never had before! I don't think my writing will ever be truly mainstream, I think it's too quirky."
Sephera: "Do you have any wisdom you'd like to impart to would-be writers, to fans, or to goths? "
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Storm: "Fans are very important, because without them no writer would have an audience, so I have the greatest gratitude to and respect for mine. I'm lucky in that I have quite a close association with the core of my fan base—the people who have designed Web sites about my work or who write fan fiction based in worlds I've created. I'm holding a convention for them in England in October 2003 [Grissecon 1]."
Caitlin: "Stay spooky, dress better than everyone else, and chew with your mouth closed."
Nancy: "I'm so grateful that goth exists—or I would have had to invent it! Goths are the most interesting, intelligent, and creative people on this earth. I appreciate that my work appeals to such people, that I can call goths 'family' in the most positive meaning of the word. May the power of darkness continue to permeate our souls!"
Freda: "If you enjoy a book pass the word on to your friends. Publishers tell us that word-of-mouth is what really sells books, and that keeps them in print longer and means there will be more books published of the sort you like to read. And writers can keep on writing! And apart from that, thanks for reading my work. When people write or e-mail to tell me they've got so much out of one of my novels, it makes it all worthwhile. I really appreciate it."
Other undead authors goths admire include: Clive Baker, J.G. Ballard, Ray Bradbury, Italo Calvino, Clint Catalyst, Nick Cave, Nancy Collins, Charles de Lint, Umberto Eco, Harlan Ellison, Sephera Giron, Tanya Huff, Barbara Hambly, Verschwende Deine Jugend (German New Wave and Punk scene), Stephen King, Tanith Lee, China Mieville, Octavio Paz, Terry Prachett, Thomas Roche, David Schow, Peter Underwood, Colin Wilson, and Mehitobel Wilson.
bards
Poets, that most misunderstood of species, are almost all goth by definition.
Rain Graves is coauthor of The Gossamer Eye, among the other poetry, fiction, and nonfiction she has published since 1997. She lives in San Francisco, and is the poetry editor for gothic.net. "I consider myself a lot of things—goth is definitely one of them. Given that most goths are defined by appearance, I should preface to say that on any given day I don't neces-
Gofcdess of Junculs
In Cibirina's kitchen
one can find snull children
fattened limbs, all butter and brine
nritb blue lips that neper uttered a tvord. She bolds ber cupped bands
beneath loins
to catch tbe fore and afterbirth of all the little souls, aborted.
CDotb«rs rocep for not being mothers at all.
Obitina weeps
for all she touches,
all she takes home, and holds.
—Rain Graces

sarily look or feel 'goth.' I teach and perform Argentine tango—so there are days I look like something out of a turn-of-the-century brothel in South America. There are days I'm corporate, and days I just go to the post office in ratty sweats. I'd say it would be more accurate to define me as Lon Chancy's daughter than anything else."
Rain believes that what makes a poem goth is that it "Tends to be of dark subject matter, angsty, sad, or macabre—from cemeteries to lovers to BDSM bloodplay. It's a fine line between what one might call 'goth' and just 'dark.' Dark poetry encompasses anything and everything a horror novel, dark fantasy novel, or science fiction novel might. Sonnets about Cthulhu. A love letter to Hannibal Lechter. The sadness one feels bending over the grave of their father, or mother, or child. These are things the literary world might dismiss as disgusting or outrageous subject matter, even though it may be written just as well as Tennyson or Keats. Dark poetry goes all the way back to them. It's been around in morbid fascination and revered for centuries but tucked away in that vein of'literature' that cannot be touched in modern poetical times."
Like most poets, most writers, Rain derives inspiration from "People I meet, places I go, things I do, what I read. It could be the way a flower wilts in a dandelion patch, the way an old man is bent as he smiles, or a sudden impulse to catalogue someone else's beauty. Music, visual stimulation, and sometimes drink—it all lends to this in both good and bad ways. I have to 'feel' something before I can write it." Her favorite poets include "Malaysian writer A.M. Muffaz, Chilean Pablo Neruda, who wrote some chilling war poetry, Neil Caiman, Canadian dark poet Sandra Kasturi, New York writer Linda Addison, Charlee Jacobs, Daphne Gottlieb. One can never forget Dante. "Manifestation of the Animals" by Ernest Boz-zano. And Angus Griswold, a misguided Scottish writer, wrote some really gross dark poetry about sheep . . . but I digress."
piercing periodicals
Magazines and periodicals come and go in the goth world. Many of the larger goth magazines are sprinkled throughout this book, catering to music, literature, fashion, and obscura. The City Morgue is a small publication, and reveals a lot of what little goth zines are about.
Courtesy of The City Morgue. Photo by Larry Bradby

Damion Boulden wanted to start a magazine because he thought it would be a good way to get his art published, and to meet new people. "We also wanted to give back something to the people to enjoy, and to showcase local talent. This idea is, if there was no place for Damion to showcase, then possibly no one else had an outlet either."
The City Morgue is located in Alexandria, Virginia. Like many labors of love, this magazine operates by collective, which includes Damion—art/photo editor/layout; Joshua Hoover—ad/marketing manager; Carrie Hoover—article editor; Kris Kochevar— business manager/copy editor; Christophe Maso—fiction editor. Their first issue was born February 2002. Joshua says, "We try to take a little of each area of goth and even branch out into non-goth topics, since the majority of our content is based on people submitting their work to us. We don't place restrictions requiring it to be goth. We like to allow others to explore other genres, but we try to maintain a goth theme. Initially we wanted to highlight local talent, but realized if we wanted to branch out, we shouldn't limit ourselves to the DC area for submissions. We now highlight artists nationwide and abroad. A quarter of our print run is sent to the UK." He goes on to say "We give a voice to the muted artist. We bring more than pretty pictured models and fashion to life, or 'beautiful people.' "
Another small goth publication is the formerly black-and-white Hymni Nocturnales, a 90-percent French language zine out of Montreal, now a Web publication. Their first issue appeared June 2001 and they have published monthly since.
Michel Poulin de Courval, editor-in-chief of Hymni Nocturnales says that the collective began the publication in order "To promote the cultural and artistic scene of nocturnal Quebec. Any subject, artistic, musical, or cultural that has a link with the night can be included. It's a place for expression of the dark side of goth artists, authors, painters, photographers, or any fan of lunar inspiration. We want to gather as many artists as we can in Quebec around the same passion."
Hymni Nocturnales features short prose, poems, papers on anthropological subjects, local and international news, CD and concert reviews, any nighttime goth topics. "We're hoping to make the zine self-sustaining. We 'd like to expand our network beyond the zine to include other cultur-

al and artistic media to better promote the talents of local creative goths."
exquisite Art
ATS Moriendi, illustrations of the art of dying, emerged in the fifteenth century when Europe was awash with plague. In these illustrations, the dying person encounters priests, demons, angels, friends, all of whom argue the merits of heaven or hell, trying to sway the soon-to-be-departed towards one realm or the other.
More than a century later, when the Cimetiere des Innocents in Paris was destroyed, along with it went the walls. On those walls originated amazing and macabre artwork, accompanied by poetry attributed to Jean Gerson, all of which has come to be called Danse
Macabre in French, the Dance of death in English, and Totentan^ in German.
Danse Macabre artwork, and the poetic story often accompanying each illustration, is a dialogue and a dance between human beings and skeletons representing death. The skeletons, due to primitive medical knowledge, are not always anatomically correct. Sometimes they appear friendly, sometimes angry, rarely sad, occasionally menacing. They are engaged in energetic debate that has a seductive undertone because the job of the skeletons is to move the living along into their world.
The soon-to-cease-living human beings represent a spectrum of society: lawyer, doctor, priest, farmer, laborer, and so on. Death entices, cajoles, argues, all in an attempt to dance the mortal to his or her demise. In the end, of course, Death succeeds. Danse Macabre is a memento mori (remember, you must die). The dance is irrespective of persons. The theme clearly reminds us that each one of us will die, eventually, from the wealthiest corporate mogul to the poorest homeless person, the exercise fanatic to the terminally-ill patient, the newborn and the centenarian, men, women, hermaphrodites, and transgendered alike, all will reach a level playing field in the end.
Fortunately, a few copies based on the original Danse Macabre artwork

at the Cimetiere des Innocents were made on church walls in France and other European cities. Unfortunately only a handful remain.
Publisher Guyot Marchand in 1486 used Gerson's poem, and illustrations by an anonymous artist who replicated the twenty-three tableauxs from the walls of the Cimetiere des Innocents based on woodcuts done the year before by Hans Holbein the Younger. Holbein's woodcuts have become the template for Danse Macabre that has come down to us through the ages, reproduced most often in books. All of the people depicted in the original Danse Macabre were male.
In France at that time, the Danse Macabre frescoes at La Chaise-Dieu were the only ones commonly known to include women. Then another set of frescoes of females (and males) with skeletons, The Dance of Basel, was discovered in Switzerland in 1480 when a Dominican convent of sisters was evacuated. The macabre dance of Kleinbasel reveals female figures conversing with death. The nunnery was demolished but fortunately an exact copy had been made across the Danube at a monastery, preserving the female Dance of Death. Here, death can even be amusing.
Another Danse Macabre des Femmes (Dance of Death of Women) found in a lavishly illuminated late-medieval manuscript, is based on a fifteenth-century French poem by Martial of Auvergne that describes thirty-six women, called to dance with skeletons.
Death in skeletal form varies in its depiction, depending on the country from which it originates. German images are a bit more grisly, showing some flesh remaining, and a few tufts of hair. Elsewhere, figures appear more stark, the drawings primitive. Still others are sophisticated. Some dances show several skeletons and several people together.
Between the seventeenth and the twentieth centuries, artists in Germany, England, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, the United States, and elsewhere have produced artwork utilizing the same type of imagery, of a skeleton patiently bringing the living toward dissolution. Notable is Thomas Chambra's illustrations of the eighteenth century.
Another extensive Dance of Death appeared in England at the end of the nineteenth century when noted humorist and political satirist and artist Thomas Rowlandson produced two volumes of wry poetry and tinted sketches of skeletons in dialogue with (usually) resistant Englishmen and women.
Danse Macabre is also the name of a famous symphonic poem for orchestra, reminiscent of bony skeletons dancing in graveyards. Camille Saint-Saens, born in 1835, was the composer, and his macabre work was thought to be influenced by his readings of the bubonic plague of the fourteenth century.
The founder of a California theatrical troupe researched the Danse Macabre woodcuts, fascinated by the instruments many of the skeletons are seen with in the drawings, and replicated those musical instruments, then formed the Bone Band, which also draws its influences from Mexico's Day of the Dead festivities.
For over thirty years the grinning skull with roses motif—an early death's image—has been symbolic of the rock band the Grateful Dead.
The goth-Industrial metal border-crossing band Danse Macabre uses the name, and one of their most famous songs is "Totentanz," German for "dead dance."
California artist Beatrice Coron has produced a modern Danse Macabre of paper cuttings and dialogues based on the original works, in a limited edition of three copies!
There's a goth message board called Danse Macabre; bestselling horror author Stephen King wrote his thoughts and experiences with the world of horror in the book entitled Danse Macabre; the role-playing game set in 1356 Paris is called Danse Macabre; there exists a 3-D comic called Danse Macabre; and the entire country of Mexico devotes two days a year to their living version of Danse Macabre: el Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) (see Chapter 10), during which human beings dance alongside skeletons through the streets, reflecting the eternal connection between the living and those who have passed before them through the veil to another realm.
the pre-RApbAelites
Pre-Raphaelite art and goth are linked at the soul level. Pre-Raphaelite paintings, from the mid- to late-1800s, were typically executed in delicate colors with a kind of inner radiance to the work. The subject matter involves brooding faces, sometimes trance-like and full of moodiness. Sensitive men and dreamy, languid women full of half-requited or suicidal passions portray moments of mythological stories and legends that had

often been told through poetry. The highly romantic bittersweet images that the Pre-Raphaelite painters are famous for evoke emotion in the viewer—what the painters intended.
In 1848 England, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded—a group of young painters who changed painting forever. Three of the originals were John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. An unconventional lot, they flew in the face of rules and what was expected of painters then, and managed to turn the world of painting of the day upside-down. Millais described the then-favored style of painting as "Drooping branches of brown trees over a night-like sky, or a column with a curtain unnaturally arranged."
The Pre-Raphaelite painters worked with light, attempting to capture a natural feeling by painting on a wet white background, a technique derived from fresco painting. As Gay Daly describes in her book Pre-Raphaelites in Love, their methods departed radically from what was fashionable in the art world at that time, where painting was done on a dry canvas coated with asphaltum, a tarry brown compound that muted colors. The Pre-Raphaelites decided that the previous three centuries of art were lacking in aesthetics and jumped back in time, pre-Renaissance, prior to the painter Raphael, in order to capture the spirit of the early Italian artists. They wanted to return to a direct connection to nature. They craved that inner light.
They achieved their goal, but not without a tremendous amount of rejection by the established order. Back then, the Royal Academy was the only game in town for painters. The curse of death was either to not have a painting selected for exhibition there, or to be hung so high up the wall toward the vaulted ceiling that no one could see your work. It took years for these three innovators to be shown at eye level.
What captures most people immediately about Pre-Raphaelite art is the use of vibrant, almost burning color, color that—combined with the bittersweet emotions captured on the faces of the subjects and the intense, often dark, mood—stirs the emotions and moves the soul.
Perhaps the most well-known painting is by John William Waterhouse, not one of the original Pre-Raphaelites, but of the second wave, who came thirty years later. His The Lady of Shalott, painted in 1888, depicts what many goths consider to be the most poignant heartbreaking sadness. This

classical image is based on the beautiful and moody poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson written in 1832. (see Chapter 5).
As amazing as the Pre-Raphaelite paintings are, they could not have been accomplished without the help of the women who modeled for them. Many of those women were shopgirls or ladies of the night, whom the Pre-Raphaelite painters discovered and became obsessed with.
Elizabeth Siddal, found working in a hat shop, is the most well-known, and perhaps the most pathetic of the models. Siddal and Rossetti eventually married, but only after years of a tumultuous relationship. Siddal produced some artwork in her own right in the Pre-Raphaelite style, for which she received positive critical review. Lizzie's life was full of illness and insecurity. The only child she conceived was stillborn. She died of laudanum poisoning. Rossetti stood over her body for four days after her death crying "Lizzie, Lizzie, come back to me."
The Pre-Raphaelites were innovators, outre artists, given to experimentation in both their work and their lifestyles. More than one model had an affair with more than one artist. Their complicated relationships, based on mixing passion and beauty, resulted in wild and tempestuous involvements. A shared aesthetic in art extended to relationships. Reading about their lives is about as close to a goth soap opera as one can get.
modern gotbic Art
One modern gothic favorite is the late Edward Gorey, writer of idiosyncratic little books illustrated with his humorously stark black-and-white artwork evoking Victorian society. Gorey managed to illustrate in words and pictures a wicked bend in reality, creating slightly odd and un-nervingly off-kilter images.
Edward St. John Gorey was born on February 22,1925, in Chicago. He was not part of the nineteenth century, nor did he travel outside the United States. He spent most of his life on Cape Cod, alone, an eccentric, occasionally traveling to New York City to see the ballet. He was, apparently, a highly opinionated man, bizarre, living a lifestyle that definitely reflected another era, one in which eccentricity was encouraged if not valued. His love of the arts was particular, and ranged from classical ballet to The X-Files and Bujjy the Vampire Slayer.
The Victorian mode of expression he favored in his artwork and the
PRJ-RgPHOELltE fflODELS AflD tNEJRj-OVES
Fanny Cornforth: (Lady of the night, long-term affair with the married Rossetti)
Jane Burden: (Unhappily married to Pre-Raphaelite arts-and-crafts artist William Morris, long-term affair with Rossetti, affair with Blunt). Morris appeared in many Pre-Raphaelite paintings, including Rossetti's Proserpine.
Georgiana Macdonald: (Painted in her own right Wife of Edward Bume-Jones, who had affairs during his marriage to Maria Zambaco, Frances Horner, and Helen Mary Gaskell)
Annie Miller: (Barmaid/lady of the night, affairs with Rossetti, Hunt, and Lord Ranelagh whom she eventually married)
Fanny Miller: (Dubious background, married Hunt, died in childbirth)
Christina Rossetti: (Poet and sister to Rossetti)
Effie Ruskin: (Married art critic John Ruskin, affair with Millais, scandalous divorce from Ruskin and marriage to Millais)
Elizabeth Siddal: (Married Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Achieved critical acclaim as a painter in her own right)
Edith Waugh: (Second wife to Holman Hunt)
Maria Zambaco: (Affair with the married Edward Burne-Jones)

French bons mots sprinkled throughout his written work are not from his direct experience with Victorian England or France, although he did study French. Gorey—and goths relate to him partially for this reason—loved a time and place not his own. He brought another century to life in both his art and in his lifestyle.
The subject matter of Gorey's books and art is familiar. We 've read his demented little poetic snippets and highly cryptic phrases that accompany his fine black-and-white drawings of dismal and helpless beings stuck in A Situation. His artwork extended beyond the interiors and covers of his own books to be included in the work of others as well.
Edward Gorey is even more popular posthumously than during his lifetime. Now all manner of products bearing Edward Gorey's hapless full-moonfaced characters is available: Deranged Cousins calendars, Neglected Murderesses date books, address books depicting the Man in the Long Raccoon Coat, Christmas cards featuring various Victorians carting their fruitcakes to an ice hole to be dropped in. (Gorey hated fruitcake and joked that there were only a few fruitcakes in the world, never eaten, repackaged each Christmas and given as gifts.) There are CD covers, rubber stamps, mouse pads, posters, and on and on. PBS commissioned Gorey to design a little coffin as a giveaway that has become a valuable collectible. The Funeral Consumers Alliance commissioned a T-shirt design, two designs for coffee mugs, as well as the cover sketch on the booklet and another sketch on the refrigerator magnet included in the package of their "Before I Go, You Should Know" end-of-life planning kit. One mug features the twenty-six adorable children of his Gashleycrumb Tinies world, accompanied by the cadaverous stovepipe-hatted funeral director holding a large, black umbrella haphazardly over their cherubic heads.
Perhaps Gorey's most famous work, and one for which he won awards, is the theater poster (and sets) he created for the 1977 Broadway production of Dracula starring Frank Langella. It is a perfect example of the artist's charmingly macabre style—the fragile heroine adorned in gauzy fabric, draped across the lavish bed while the dark, bewinged vampire gazes down upon her with not-quite-obvious ill intent.
Certainly it is the darkside of life that Gorey presented to us, the world goths understand only too well. Often his women and children possess a waif-like fragility, a born-victim quality. He drew ballerinas. His men wore running shoes, and long fur coats (as did Gorey himself). Beyond his hu-

mans, Gorey portrayed cats—he had a houseful. But some of his characters were like gargoyles in that they were neither this nor that— most popular is the strange and pointy-faced, scarf-and-Keds-wearing creature featured in The Doubtful Guest.
Edward Gorey declared that he had no wish to live on into the twenty-first century. He died April 13, 2000, of a heart attack. Thank God his work exists. Almost every one of The \ Section mentioned Gorey and, to quote ariana, "We would be lesser mortals without him."
Another popular modern artist is British photographer Simon Mars-den. Simon, fifty-three years old, lives in the countryside of England. His amazing photographs have seen print in seven books. The haunting otherworldly style and the dark subject matter he pursues—from decrepit ruins to nature's bleakness to the lost elements of previously communist East Germany and the darkly romantic sites in Venice—ensure that his work is beloved by goths around the world.
Simon says he had no idea what he wanted to do in life until he became interested in photography but: "My father gave me a camera on my twenty-first birthday."
He claims he was "... brought up in a haunted house in the remote English countryside, and my father had a large library of books on the supernatural. I am beginning to realize that I have always been interested in the Gothic period, the architecture, the romance, perhaps the highest point in the history of man's artistic achievements."
Besides a sharp eye for subject matter and angle, what makes his photographs so eerily beautiful is technique. He uses black-and-white infrared film, which turns day into night. The result is a photo that resembles an etching. "My pictures have always been dark and mysterious, no matter what the subject matter," but he recognizes that "some people seem frightened by the images."
Simon photographs with an honorable objective in mind. "I simply want to inspire the viewer not to take everything around him or her at face value; to show that what we are conditioned to believe is 'reality' may not be all it seems, if only we take the time to inquire."

One of his favorite moments involves a goth. "During an exhibition for the book Visions of Poe in a London gallery, I spent an afternoon in the gallery on the opening day where I noticed a very gothic-looking lady spending a very long time looking at the pictures. After about an hour she left without saying a word, returning ten minutes later with a beautiful bunch of white lilies which she presented to me on behalf of herself and all like-minded people, as a thank you for presenting such a beautiful and moving show-book."
His most recent work is The Twilight Hour, photographs illustrating extracts from masters of the supernatural with Celtic ancestry, which includes Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, and Sheridan le Fanu. He has also just released a seventy-minute film on the same subject called Simon Mars-den's The Twilight Hour.
Other artists, past to present, special to goths are: Lorraine Albright, Diane Arbus; Jason Beam; Ambrose Bierce; William Blake; Hieronymus Bosch; Sandro Botticelli; Walter Crane; Salvador Dali; Leonardo da Vinci; Edgar Degas; Gustave Dore; Albrecht Diirer; (Romaine de Tirtoff) Erte; M.C. Escher; Brian Froud; H.R. Giger; Jenny Holtzer; David Horton; Paul Klee; Gustav Klimt; Ivan Le; Robert Mapplethorpe; Franz Marc; Rene Magritte; John Martinez; Dave McKean; Michaelangelo Buonarroti; Claude Monet; Henry Moore; Alphonse Mucha; Theirry Mu-gler; Edvard Munch; Kay Neilsen; Georgia O'Keefe; Yoko Ono; Michael Parkes; Pablo Picasso; Floria Sigismondi; Vincent van Gogh; Andy Warhol, and Joel Peter Whitkin.
The most beloved contemporary artist among goths universally is, not surprisingly, Tim Burton. Burton is best known for his movies, with goth favorites being: Beetle Juice; Ed Wood; Edward Scissorhands; Sleepy Hollow and the wonderful grimly clever animation The Nightmare Before Christmas. Yet Burton did not begin his career in film; he started work as a cartoonist, and an animator for Walt Disney Studios.
Tim Burton was born in conformist, middle-of-the-road Burbank, California in 1958. In an online interview with Gavin Smith, he said, "When you grow up in a blank, unemotional environment. . . the impulse to create and do stuff, especially movies, is a desire to create things that you are lacking in your life." A quiet and moody boy who loved horror films, he drew from an early age. As a youth, he made a couple of Super-8 movies, one a wolf tale, another called The Island of Doctor Agor.

One of his favorite moments involves a goth. "During an exhibition for the book Visions of Poe in a London gallery, I spent an afternoon in the gallery on the opening day where I noticed a very gothic-looking lady spending a very long time looking at the pictures. After about an hour she left without saying a word, returning ten minutes later with a beautiful bunch of white lilies which she presented to me on behalf of herself and all like-minded people, as a thank you for presenting such a beautiful and moving show-book."
His most recent work is The Twilight Hour, photographs illustrating extracts from masters of the supernatural with Celtic ancestry, which includes Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe, and Sheridan le Fanu. He has also just released a seventy-minute film on the same subject called Simon Mars-den's The Twilight Hour.
Other artists, past to present, special to goths are: Lorraine Albright, Diane Arbus; Jason Beam; Ambrose Bierce; William Blake; Hieronymus Bosch; Sandro Botticelli; Walter Crane; Salvador Dali; Leonardo da Vinci; Edgar Degas; Gustave Dore; Albrecht Diirer; (Romaine de Tirtoff) Erte; M.C. Escher; Brian Froud; H.R. Giger; Jenny Holtzer; David Horton; Paul Klee; Gustav Klimt; Ivan Le; Robert Mapplethorpe; Franz Marc; Rene Magritte; John Martinez; Dave McKean; Michaelangelo Buonarroti; Claude Monet; Henry Moore; Alphonse Mucha; Theirry Mu-gler; Edvard Munch; Kay Neilsen; Georgia O'Keefe; Yoko Ono; Michael Parkes; Pablo Picasso; Floria Sigismondi; Vincent van Gogh; Andy Warhol, and Joel Peter Whitkin.
The most beloved contemporary artist among goths universally is, not surprisingly, Tim Burton. Burton is best known for his movies, with goth favorites being: Beetle Juice; Ed Wood; Edward Scissorhands; Sleepy Hollow and the wonderful grimly clever animation The Nightmare Before Christmas. Yet Burton did not begin his career in film; he started work as a cartoonist, and an animator for Walt Disney Studios.
Tim Burton was born in conformist, middle-of-the-road Burbank, California in 1958. In an online interview with Gavin Smith, he said, "When you grow up in a blank, unemotional environment. . . the impulse to create and do stuff, especially movies, is a desire to create things that you are lacking in your life." A quiet and moody boy who loved horror films, he drew from an early age. As a youth, he made a couple of Super-8 movies, one a wolf tale, another called The Island of Doctor Agor.

He said in the same interview that he was drawn toward filmmaking because it forced him to relate to people. "When you look at all the people who work in films, they're all kind of loser types." But working on a film, "All of a sudden you find yourself in an environment where you have to speak to hundreds of people during a day."
Burton won a scholarship and attended the California Institute for the Arts in 1979 and 1980, a school founded by Walt Disney. He ended up working for Disney, but much of the "happy" animation he did left him depressed. He longed for work that let in the darkness which, of course, Disney Studios was not known for then. But it was in 1982, while working for Disney, that he had the opportunity to create the very gothic five-minute short Vincent, a tribute to one of his idols, Vincent Price, which Price narrated. He also wrote and directed the twenty-nine-minute live-action Frankenweenie in 1984, a remake of Frankenstein where the monster is a dog. Disney deemed the latter an unsuitable product and the film did not see video release until 1992. Ironically, it premiered on the Disney Channel! Both of these films can be viewed on The Nightmare Before Christmas DVD.
Tim Burton has a passionate love of myths and fairy tales and the derth of such in the United States has led him to try to create a few. Edward Scis-sorhands—intrinsically goth—is one attempt. He told Smith, "The people I have known who have been individuals have always been tortured. There's this love-hate thing in the [U.S.]; they get preyed upon and devoured." Another element in the film comes from Burton's psyche. He admits to being a Punk-music junkie in his youth, and he frequented clubs but he could never bring himself to speak with anyone. Edward Scis-sorhands captures that sense of the outsider, of alienation, of strong emotions with no way to verbally communicate them to another person.
Burton has said he is fascinated with dualities, and most of his films reflect that. Perhaps this is why he has been such an incredible success in Hollywood and yet at the same time embraced by goths.
tV with bite
"Six participants were chosen at random from a murder of goths at Toronto's Velvet Underground bar. Representing S.S.U. (Shapeshifter University): Liisa Ladouceur, a writer; Baron Marcus, a Microsoft Access developer as well as frontman for the band Vampire Beach Babes; and

Drawing by Hugues Leblanc
Renee, a student of biomechanical engineering. Representing B.S.C. (Bloodsucker College): Singuala, door girl at an unnamed New York gothic club; Peter Mansfield, gothic zinester; and Stephanie Quinlan, moderator of the Toronto Dark Writers' Group. And let us not forget the stunning Ola, our Vanna White in black."
These are the words of Canadian writer and Book TV head honcho Daniel Richler, who produced Reach for the Crypt, the first goth game show for TV. Daniel acts as host, tossing out questions about the King of the Un-dead himself, Dracula. The correct answers are confirmed by Dracula specialist Elisabeth Miller. "It's dressed up as the 'several thousandth' episode," Daniel says, "as if it were a show doomed to air eternally with the two teams forever stuck 'neck and neck' [arfarf], at fourteen hundred and thirty eight points apiece. [The points are years accumulated on the teams' respective gravestones; the aim is to catch up with the present Year of Our Lord, thus to be released from the agony of undeath and to die, at last, in peace. But of course the episode ends with the same score it started with.]
"My principal interest," Daniel confides, "was to demonstrate that those weird, shrouded kids you see squinting against the sun aren't only fashion victims; that they are the most literate of the pop tribes, in my \\CTJ. RFTC^a.%\m^\te&fo%\.arAfotemosX\^"C>t.\A\\Ws, Dracula: Sense and Nonsense. But it was also an opportunity to taVk about -writers o? %ox\v-ic interest such as Sheridan le Fanu, Andrei Codrescu, Oscar Wilde, et al. In the end I think the teams acquit themselves very well, demonstrating a healthy mix of obsession and bullshit detection, especially since half the show was booby-trapped."
Daniel authored the Punk coming-of-age novel Kicking Tomorrow in 1992. Does he consider himself goth? "I'd feel like a pretender if I called myself a goth. I look pretty bad in a fishnet shirt and corset collar, for a start. I also think that saying 'I'm goth' sounds like you're trying too hard; like being eccentric, it's something that's better said of you by others. Nonetheless, I developed a gothic sensibility quite early. I was also aware at the time that my mother bore a striking resemblance to Morticia Ad-dams. Later on my father wrote some movies and I remember him sending me a letter from Hollywood that bore the The Omen's six-six-six logo on the envelope; he wrote me that all the research you'll ever need is contained in Revelations. Latterly, my interest in modern goths stemmed from a glancing reportorial acquaintance with the guys in Bauhaus, and

from a more sustained relationship with some Hungarian Grufti—the goths notorious for keeping up that country's world-ranking suicide performance. Come to think of it, I don't see how it's possible to a have a 'sustained' relationship with suicides. ..."
Reach for the Crypt has aired in Canada, and is making the rounds and may see the light of the moon on a TV screen near you.
Many of The f Section does not watch much or any TV. And when they do watch, most claim they don't like it. DUSK says, "What's available? So let's say [I watch] nothing." More than one of The \ Section watches "the' news!" Vile admits. And Cemetery Crow says, "The news. I love it. Don't ask me why!" VampirMike says he "watches it all, because it's fun to see the crazy people."
sinister cincnu
Theda Bara and Rudolph Valentine, Hollywood silent screen stars around the 1920s, were both early prototypes of the goth look. Theda snagged the term "vamp," with her sultry and seductive look, and became the precursor for female vampires in silent films. Valentine exuded the charm and charisma of the darkly romantic and exquisitely handsome lover, full of passion and not afraid to express it.
In 1922 the German filmmaker F. W. Murnau tried to buy the film rights to Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. Stoker's widow, Florence, refused to sell. Undaunted, the thirty-four-year-old Murnau made the film anyway. To get around the copyright issue, he called his movie Nosferatu, and named the vampire Count Orlok, played so disturbingly by actor Max Schreck. He was sued for copyright infringement anyway. Florence asked the court to order all copies of the black-and-white silent film destroyed by fire. But, of course, mysteriously, copies survived, or we wouldn't be able to see the movie today.
Murnau went on to make other films, including Faust. He died in 1931 in Santa Barbara, California, when his car went off the road on a stretch of coastline. His fourteen-year-old Filipino houseboy Garcia Stevenson was driving. The book Hollywood Babylon recounts a rumor that Murnau was pleasuring his houseboy at the time of the accident.
In 1979 German filmmaker Werner Herzog directed the gorgeous remake, called Nosferatu the Vampyre, starring the late Klaus Kinski as the hideous Orlok, and Isabelle Adjani as his exquisitely beautiful nemesis,

Lucy Marker. Set to the lonely and terrifying music of Richard Wagner, almost every goth who sees this film has been swept away by the dark magic of Herzog's cinematic poetry.
The superb 2001 movie Shadow of the Vampire, directed by E. Elias Merhige and starring Villem Dafoe and John Malkovich, is an intriguing fantasy of the filming of the original Nosferatu.
One modern cinema vamp with super goth appeal is Elvira, aka, Cassandra Peterson, who says, "Do I consider myself a goth? I consider myself the Queen of Goths! I hate to sound too egotistical, but I feel very much like Elvira is somewhat of a forerunner of the goth movement. When I started doing the character, people looked at me like [I was] some kind of a freak just because my nails were black! Now Beverly Hills wives paint their nails black. It's great that all the misfits and freaks of the world, like myself, have their own special club to belong to."
Elvira got her start on TV. "I first hosted late-night horror movies on TV in L.A., then was able to syndicate the show across the country and eventually wrote and sold a movie idea involving the character [Elvira, Mistress of the DarK\ and actually got it made. It only took thirteen years to get another movie made!" {Elvira's Haunted Hills (2001)]
The slinky, witty Elvira who sports the ultimate in an hourglass figure, came about, like so many cool things in life, by accident. Cassandra says, "I actually didn't have any role models for Elvira. I got the part in 1981 when the director at a local L.A. TV station was looking for someone to host old horror movies and saw me doing improv with the Groundlings, a popular improvisational comedy group in L.A. (along with Phil Hartman and Paul "Pee-wee Herman" Reubens). Once I got the part, the station told me I needed a 'scary' look, since, after all, I was hosting horror movies. Their only stipulation was that I dress all in black.
"My best friend at the time, Robert Redding, designed the 'look.' He borrowed the hairstyle from Ronnie Spector of the sixties girl group the Ronettes, the makeup from a book about Japanese Kabuki theater, and the dress . . . well, he just designed it as low-cut and form-fitting as possible, since, as we all know, sex sells.
"Vampira, of fifties horror-hosting fame, later sued me for allegedly ripping her off, but it was thrown out of court. If anything, I subconsciously got input for my character from Morticia Addams, since I grew up worshiping The Addams Family TV show."

She sees her most recent movie, Elvira 's Haunted Hills, as a goth staple. "I think it's a perfect movie for the goth crowd because its roots are in the old gothic-horror films of the sixties from AIP, Hammer, and Roger Cor-man. It also costars Richard O'Brien, the writer, creator and costar of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and of course, it stars . . . Elvira!"
Goth favorite directors and filmmakers include: Dario Argento, John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, Werner Herzog, David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, and Guillermo Del Toro.
high- *no lowbrow art
In 1897 France, a type of theater became popular known as Le Grand Guignol, and its grisly reign lasted for sixty years. Taking bites out of the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, and elements of medieval, Elizabethan, and Jacobean dramas as well as the dark emotions of Gothic melodrama, Le Grand Guignol went further in its outrageous approach to violence than all of those, and became the sinister granddaddy of modern horror.
In its day, it did blatantly what theater had not done before — throats were slit, eyeballs gouged out, limbs severed. Fake blood spurted freely from the stage, chopped limbs dropped to the floor, gore splattered the audience — all this was early FX, but not the Hollywood type. Terror and cruelty were its backbone, black humor the underbelly. In its heydays actors fought for parts in these shows, and the theater of le Grand Guignol drew to the theater hordes of tourists and Parisian regulars — called Guignolers — all hoping to be shocked, hell-bent on a dose of ultra-reality of the perverse kind. This is the basis for the Theatre of the Vampires that Anne Rice so cleverly wrote about in Interview With the Vampire, whose star performer, the vampire Armand, was alluringly played on the screen by Antonio Banderas.
Live theater, dance, and opera often appeal to goths, especially performances involving darker subject matter, like the undead.
Dracula, on Broadway and on tour, with its decadent Edward Gorey sets, starred Frank Langella, who brought that production to film with Kate Nelligan as Mina Marker. This modern version showed the audience more overt eroticism than previous retellings of Stoker's classic.
The opera Der Vampyr by Heinrich Marschner, the nineteenth-century German composer, has never been staged outside Germany. The story is

based on the short story "The Vampire," started by English poet Lord Byron. His personal physician, John Polidori, pulled the fragment from the trash, completed the tale, and published it under his own name.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) produced a television adaptation of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet performance of Dracula, directed by Guy Madden, who specializes in films with a 1930s German-decadence look. The filmed ballet morphed into a film directed by Madden: Dracula: Pages From a Virgin's Diary, a quirky old-cinema-style movie full of wit and touches of surrealism, staring Wei Qiang-Zhang as Dracula.
Nosferatu was transformed into an opera, staged in various parts of North America in 1991, written by Randolph Peters—demand for tickets for the world premier was unprecedented.
Dracul, An Eternal Love Story, was staged by Mainstage Productions for the first time in California in 1997, with an accompanying CD, and a novel based on the production written by Nancy Kilpatrick.
One popular European opera was The Last Vampire Show, staged initially in Vienna in 1997.
Other goth favorites include the musical Phantom of the Opera; the play Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; the stage musical and film The Rocky Horror Picture Show; the ballet Frankenstein; the sideshow Carnival Diablo; and the stage play and film Marat/Sade.