Unfortunately, The Gothic Horror Is Autofiction

these posts mainly go out through my newsletter here. follow on IG, Bsky, and Substack @everzines. get in touch by email.

When my dad told stories about his life, it was a kind of religious fiction. Not because he was necessarily lying. (I’m sure he was, sometimes.) But because you gotta embellish a little for a story to be a story. Even the basic act of drawing a narrative arc for your particular character — selecting a beginning and end to a given memory, making those points meet — is the arbitrary, creative work of a fiction author. Nobody can tell a tale of redemption without a little fiction. That this fiction happens to be structured around sincere belief and held as truth to the teller is incidental to the story. I’m pretty sure this is how we construct the self.

It’s easy for me to say this like a critic. It’s a lot harder as storyteller to actually face the parts of your life you’re mythologizing when you write a story. My name comes from a poem I wrote in 2020 called “River Bed” about a femme they/them who lies about, depressed, in their orange-color bedroom. The final two lines are, “They lay upon their sheets and simmered / Like an egg in the pan.” These lines didn’t feel heavy-handed at the time. I thought I had made up the egg metaphor — I had no idea it was already a term in popular use for pre-transition trans women. I published it in a local e-magazine for which I was editor, credited to my birth name. It may sound like bullshit now but I swear to God: I did not know the poem was about me at all until about a year after its publication. That’s how I found out that I had publicly named myself Evie without noticing.

I made the decision to self-publish my first fiction chapbook last year, called The Witch of Coös. Just reread it for a third print. Despite being in a mainly exploratory phase with my fiction when I published it, not really confident enough to submit it to places or take it to an editor, I felt a personal urgency to put it out when I did for the same reason that I now feel an urgency to put out the memoir/history I’m doing on my hometown. Because when you write something really personal and then sit on it too long, eventually it stops resonating with you like that. The personal truth of the story stops feeling real and it collects dust on a shelf forever. The fiction of The Witch of Coös is less in that it features a witch or an animated skeleton and more in how it begins and ends in a satisfying way. The protagonist is, of course, me, autofictionalized so that it’s not really me. The real me who writes the story about escape and liberation doesn’t have the benefit of a first and last page. She is also, in real life, not liberated. She is — very obviously to anyone who knows her — still struggling with the legacies of the same violence her protagonist runs from. The major differences are her state and her pronouns.

I just reread The Loney by English author Andrew Michael Hurley, a gothic novel about transformation and the terrifying power of belief. It follows an English boy named Andrew and his familial abuse within a Catholic congregation. Reading it again fucked me up way worse than the first time; I loved it. I heard the author say in an interview on the podcast Talking Scared,

As a child, Andrew explains, his world was one in which heaven, hell, angels, and the Devil materially exist. The same belief forms the setting for The Loney, and presumably, the self-narration of the author’s young life. 

I don’t know anything specific about the author’s early life — he doesn’t do a lot of interviews — and so I don’t want to insinuate how close or distant Andrew the character is to Andrew the author. But it’s a gift and a clue when an author puts their own name in a story like that. Especially because the narrator, Andrew’s brother and caretaker, remains anonymous for the entirety of the book. Of the two brothers whom the story concerns, we only know one for sure: “Andrew.”

It astonishes me how real gothic horror feels to me. More than any other genre. It accomplishes feats of explanation that can’t be done in a fact-based form. When as a they/them in 2020 I first read the passage in The Haunting of Hill House where Eleanor tells the little girl, 

— I don’t know what to say other than that I found the passage to be literally true. Because this story is about the horror of internal experience, meaning the narratives we tell ourselves that make up our literal reality. It really doesn’t matter in the end whether the haunting is all in Eleanor’s head or not because the story is mainly about how Eleanor’s head is haunted.

Another top-five all-timer for me is Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House, which manages as a memoir to cover ground in such genres as “Lesbian Pulp Novel,” “Sci-fi Thriller,” and “Choose Your Own Adventure®,” among 143 others. Each of the chapters is written in a different form. Machado’s memoir is self-aware, in its basic structure, of how reality lies in how we narrate our experiences. Machado, previously famous for her gothic debut Her Body and Other Parties, is not only interested in the slippery, sometimes suspect ways we narrativize the hard facts of our existence — those solid, imposing things that Shirley Jackson calls “conditions of absolute reality.”† In the Dream House is a memoir about a woman surviving abuse. The matter of real, solid evidence — as well as its attendant insanity — are both central to the book. 

There’s a line in Dream House on the trouble of solid evidence that I used to quote when explaining the person I was in high school and college. In the chapter Dream House as Death Wish, Machado writes,

Machado knows that the kind of facts she’s working with aren’t the ones that pass in a court of law. Far more terrifying, she writes, “there are many things that happen to us that are beyond the purview of even. . . the court of other people, the court of the body.” In a case where the abuser leaves no marks, a victim sometimes lacks sufficient proof for anybody to know what really happened. Including herself.

I never wanna write too specifically about my relationship with abuse. There are enough queer, and specifically transfeminine, memoirs of abuse that I don’t feel mine has to be told. Machado’s memoir is a gift to me. I’m looking forward to reading Jamie Hood’s new book Trauma Plot: A Life, another self-aware, genre-experimental memoir for a post-#MeToo era. In my own writing, I’m cool to skirt the edges here and there with a quick essay like this one. But I have no intention to fully render my evidence in the court of other people. That’s for now, at least, while the jury remains in deliberation at the court of the body.

At the same time, it’s all I write about. I doubt I’ll tell a story that isn’t about it. It may be that a creative imagination of abuse is the permanent curse of a victim with no marks, who has only ghost stories and plastic memories in open, inconstant time. In a more general sense, it might also be that this curse is a basic part of being human. It would be less alienating for me to believe the latter. 

† “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”