For me, reading of the supernatural and weird was a way of living obliquely and at a peaceful distance from difficult things. A long illness as a teenager contributed to a search for things that echoed the upended world I now inhabited. To me, “gothic” represents what we have largely dispensed with in a hyper-rational world that directs the raging shadow side of the human personality through more tempered, acceptable psychologies. Without knowing it, my antecedents passed me a gift that remains relevant to how we deconstruct the world before reconstructing it again. It absolutely isn’t Hollywood fantasy, so much as an invaluable method of mapping the imagination.

Source: The Irish Times January 10, 2026 15:02 UTC