To read a Gothic text— The Mysteries of Udolpho , Wuthering Heights , The Fall of the House of Usher —is to read a will. There is always a document, a curse, a secret history. The horror comes from knowledge returning : the repressed truth, the forgotten relative, the ancestral crime. Madness, here, is a tragic clarity. The Gothic protagonist goes mad because they finally understand what father did.
The Gothic and the Eldritch: The Collected Sketches of Jes Goodwin
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The rumors said the text wasn't written by a man, but transcribed by someone who had listened too closely to the humming of the earth.