Gothic Beginnings, Take 2

Substack ate my first post. Spooky.

So Substack maybe did me a favor eating my first post on my new project. It was florid and indulgent and a little show-offy. Like a lot of Gothics, come to think of it.

So let’s make this short and sweet, shall we?

I love Gothic novels—I have since I first discovered Charlotte Bronte and Barbara Michaels.

Recently, I discovered the Silhouette Shadows line—a brief Harlequin series that ran from 1993 to 1996, with a total of 66 books.

I’ve been wanting to do an in-depth literary dive of a Harlequin line for a while—if I read each book in a series, treating it with a serious literary lens, what am I going to discover about the genre, the industry, the era and the country?

Things seems to have aligned with Shadows: 66 books is a manageable number to collect — the series pings on some of my literary interests, namely the Gothic and the paranormal novel — and the season is propitious. Who am I to resist the call of gothic mystery in October?

I want to find out why publishers tried to bring the gothic back in the nineties, after it’s heyday in the sixties and seventies. I want to know why it failed. I want to know what the very early years of paranormal romance looked like, before it was rebranded as Harlequin Nocturne and rode the vampire craze to success.

So first up—The Last Cavalier by Heather Graham Possezzere, published as #1 in the Shadows line in March 1993. I’m already nervous, what with the Confederate hero and all. Ew.