What do the mysterious closed-off rooms in Northanger Abbey hide-perhaps a corpse or an imprisoned wife? The gothic often works by relying on characters’ flawed perceptions or interpretations. When Jane Austen satirized Radcliffe and her cohort in Northanger Abbey, she created a heroine who can’t help but misapprehend the situation, every time anyone she meets could be harboring a murderous secret. This is the realm of the gothic, a genre popularized in part by Ann Radcliffe in the late eighteenth century. Sometimes those mysterious secrets turn out to be relatively mundane after all. Such horror thrives on secrets-the creeping revelation of the unseen or ineffable or incomprehensible-and on characters’ ability to interpret what they see. It is unnerving because of how it confronts the stuff of everyday lives: how we use technology, the spaces that we live in, and the horror that lies beneath the everyday. Samanta Schweblin’s fiction unnerves me, and it will probably unnerve you too.
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