From a scream to a whisper – ‘quiet horror’ novels are making a comeback

By Nick Freeman, Reader in Late Victorian Literature, Loughborough University

Ever since its inception with Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), a delirious mixture of violent death and familial conspiracy, gothic literature has been a restless cultural form, constantly mutating and assuming new guises but always exploring the darker side of life. Sometimes, its fashions are those of the historical moment. Sometimes they are initiated by a book enjoying unprecedented commercial success.

One of these was Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988). After the film adaptation scooped five…

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