Free Harry Potter's Bookshelf by John Granger Page A

Madness? No, he insists it’s just an “over-acuteness of the senses.”
    He dismembers the body and conceals the remains under the floorboards of the apartment. The police, having been summoned when the old man’s single scream woke the neighbors, see nothing. During their investigation, sitting in the old man’s room over the dismembered body asking questions, the narrator hears the dead man’s heart, beating louder and louder. Driven to madness, the killer confesses to the nefarious deed.

An Atmosphere of Fear
    What do these stories have in common? On the surface, not that much.
    Jane Eyre has a hard time both growing up and with romance, but she marries her true love in the end. Heathcliff and Catherine are star-crossed lovers on the Scottish moors with an unhappy beginning, middle, and ending. Frankenstein creates life, the sewn-together creature turns on its creator, and everybody dies. Dr. Jekyll releases his inner Edward Hyde but cannot put the genie back in the bottle. And Dracula ? The undead are vanquished by sacrament-wielding heroes able simultaneously to embrace science, faith, and the really far-out supernatural weirdness of Eastern European legends. Poe’s narrator-murderer seems equally unique and bizarre.
    That’s quite the spread. Believe it or not, though, all these characters conform to two types and each of the stories is about producing an unsettling atmosphere, “unnerving” all the way to “horrifying.”
    Ann Tracy, author of Patterns of Fear in the Gothic Novel, wrote that gothic literature, ultimately, was about fostering “nameless fears,” “familiar anxieties,” and an “atmosphere of irrational menace.” 2 There are obviously many different ways to produce this atmosphere and its unsettling effects, but “classic gothic” tends to use very similar specific story elements. Few stories have all these elements, however, and many contain only some.
    Let’s start with the setting.
    Gothic stories are usually set—obviously enough—in a Gothic manor or castle. There should be something supernatural or inexplicable at the very least in this manor house and probably a ghost or two will show up eventually. Think of Rochester’s mad wife walking the halls of his manor at night.
    You can also expect isolated scenes, for example, on alpine glaciers, windswept moors, or arctic expanses. And there is also a sense of confinement. The setting almost certainly will include tight spaces as well to highlight feelings of isolation in a strange place. Dr. Frankenstein tells his whole story in the captain’s cabin on a ship trapped in the ice on a voyage to the North Pole. Jekyll/Hyde has the run of misty London but eventually he locks himself in his laboratory to separate himself from all others.
    Subterranean passages for escape or adventure, dungeons for holding prisoners unjustly, an attic or especially frightening hole or room are commonplace, too. Jane Eyre is locked by her aunt in the “red room” where her uncle had died, which sends the little girl around the bend. Poe’s corpse under the floorboards and the terrifying labyrinth of Dracula’s castle are set pieces of fear and dread.
    If you venture outside in a gothic novel, you’ll find the weather is going to be tempestuous. You’ll need a light because most of the action is going to take place at night or in the dark, and the landscape is usually shrouded in mist. Vampires and the undead only walk at night, so Dracula ’s drama is largely between sundown and sunrise every day. In Jane Eyre, the only light you’re likely to experience is a fire like the one that destroys Rochester’s manor. Hyde’s London obscures his double identity in persistent mist and fog. Wuthering Heights weather forecasts are something like Seattle’s.
    Setting and weather are best understood as reflections of the interior life and feelings experienced by the narrator or protagonist. The tight space and violent storm mirror the angst of the