That master of the Freudian gothic, Patrick McGrath, will be appearing at the Kilkenny Festival on Wednesday, August 13. A full length interview is in the works, but for now we’re proud to present Patrick’s top five gothic tales of all time, lodged with the Revelatorium while he was in Dublin the other week to promote his new novel Trauma.

1. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (1847)

“Last month I re-read Wuthering Heights and was once again overwhelmed by the magnificence that is Heathcliff. There’s the moment where Cathy has just died, and he goes down to the sexton of the church and says, ‘Listen, I’ll pay you well for this, but I want you to take out the side of her coffin, and then when I’m dead, put me down beside her and take out the side of my coffin that’s facing her, and when they dig us up in fifty years they won’t be able to tell one from the other.’ That’s love!”

2. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

“Again, I re-read it over the summer and it really holds up as a gothic reflection on the divided self.”

3. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde (1891)

“A similar theme of the doubled self, but from a very different perspective, and that wonderful device of the painting absorbing the stain of sin, and the man himself remaining inviolate.”

4. Dracula – Bram Stoker (1897)

“I remember writing an introduction to this a couple of years ago, and seeing it as a sort of mandala in which every gothic idea was given its fullest development. There’s almost no gothic notion that doesn’t play out in Dracula, you can list them all: the incubus, the succubus, the night, horror, vampirism, cannibalism in a sense. There’s no transgression that isn’t somehow dealt with.”

5. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (1902)

“Heart of Darkness, although it seems to transcend genre, is such a powerful allegory of a journey into the heart of horror, in deep time. It’s like (Poe’s) ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, that sense of regressing into a very primitive place as the jungle gets more dense and primal and threatening, more full of mystery and dread and violence. Marlow goes down the river and sees that the heart of darkness is what has happened to Kurtz – in the absence of human institutions he’s become a beast.
“But here’s the interesting thing: Conrad ends the story in a very funny way. He takes Marlow back up the river, back across the country, back to Brussels, because Kurtz has asked him to go see his fiancé, a patient little Belgian woman who’s been waiting for Kurtz to come home. And she says to Marlow, in effect, ‘Did he think of me and did he die well?’ And Marlow says, ‘Yes.’ He tells this white lie just to give comfort to this woman, because he can’t bring himself to speak of the horror. What an interesting way to finish a story about the grimmest horror imaginable, to move from the most appalling of mortal sins to the most forgivable of venial sins.”

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