The 41st millennium is a grim, dark, and brooding place, a tormented galaxy dominated by a decaying Imperium.  It is thus unsurprising that the term “Gothic” recurs frequently in 40k lore.  From the Gothic Sector to the Low and High Gothic spoken by the Imperium, the setting is indelibly stamped with, uh, “Gothicism.”  But to what purpose?  How did a subculture known mostly for heavy eyeshadow and The Cure leave such a deep mark on the world of 40k?

It helps if you realize that “gothic” means more than one thing.  The 41st millennium’s Gothic obsession reflects the setting’s roots in gothic literature. And, with the publication of Pariah in 2012, Warhammer 40k came full circle: an honest-to-God-Emperor gothic novel, set in the world of 40k.

This article is, sort of, a review of Pariah and its sequel Penitent.  But more than that, it is a discussion of the gothic literary form, how that form influenced the development of the Warhammer world, and – perhaps – what it means that, at long last, Black Library has published actual gothic novels.

Being a Brief Historie of the Gothick Forme

What’s in a name, anyways?

The modern (21st century, anyways) conception of “gothic” culture derives from the musical subculture that arose in the UK in the 1970s and 80s.  A full ethnography of the goth is beyond the scope of this article; the important thing to understand is that the term “goth” derived from gothic fiction, a movement dating back to the mid-18th century.  This movement, in turn, takes its name from gothic architecture (which, amusingly enough, takes its name from the Gothic tribes that so bedeviled Rome in its later years.  See, during the Renaissance, when classical architecture was having a Moment, “gothic” architecture was thought to be lower, cruder, and less refined than classical; the term “goth” meant, in this context, basically “barbarian”).

Anyways, gothic literature is commonly thought to have originated with Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto.  From there, the movement flourished, through such tales as The Mysteries of Udolpho (Radcliffe, 1794); The Turn of the Screw (James, 1898); Carmilla (Le Fanu, 1872); and of course Dracula (Stoker, 1897).

Gothic literature prefigured modern horror, and in fact the whole genre is sometimes labeled “gothic horror.”  While stories like Dracula are of course prototypical horror, the term “gothic horror” is a generalization.  Many gothic stories are mysteries, or slow-burning thrillers, with few elements that a modern reader would consider “horror.”

That said, it is not hard to see where the label came from.  The predominant theme in gothic literature – indeed, its defining trait – is a mood of dread and haunting.  Characters in gothic novels are anxious and fearful; they are not always sure what they are afraid of, or even if there is anything to be afraid of, but their fear is, itself, very real, and often drives the plot.  Other common elements include:

• The supernatural, or at least the hint of the supernatural… though most gothic novels have few obvious fantasy elements.  In The Turn of the Screw, for example, you can never quite be sure if the “ghosts” that the narrator sees are real, or just hallucinations of an anxious mind.
• Settings of decayed grandeur.  Here is where the genre takes its name: most gothic novels are set, or at least around, ancient and moldering castles, cathedrals and estates.  Overgrown gardens, crumbling towers, musty tombs all feature heavily.
• The unspoken, the unseen, or the ambiguous.  Gothic novels often feature unreliable narrators, but even where they are reliable, they often don’t see, or barely glimpse, or won’t describe, the objects of their fascinations.  Much is left unspoken, or alluded to.  In The Mysteries of Udolpho, the main character peeks behind a black curtain and sees something that leaves her so traumatized that she will not look behind curtains for the rest of the book, but the reader never learns what it is.
• Madness, either of the narrator or others.  Lunatics like Dracula’s Renfield, Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason, and the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart are common fixtures in gothic literature.  Often, their madness is not congenital, but is caused by guilt, terror, or exposure to some insanity-inducing knowledge.  H.P. Lovecraft drew heavily on the gothic tradition, and the idea of the “book that makes you mad when you read it” is eminently gothic – especially when, as discussed above, the contents of the book are only obliquely hinted at.
• Antiheroes (or so-called Byronic heroes) – characters that are, in the words of Lord Macaulay, “proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection.”

Beyond these elements, there are tropes and motifs that recur frequently in gothic novels.  Often they are epistolary (that is, consisting of letters written between the characters) as in Dracula.  Even when they have a more traditional form, first person narration is common, and the narrator is not always named.  Characters often address the reader directly to explain either their actions or the setting, or to digress on their preoccupations.  Characters are plagued by doppelgängers, split personalities, and impersonators.  Frequently, characters are trapped or imprisoned, either physically or psychologically: Jonathan Harker is trapped in Dracula’s castle, while sisters Merricat and Constance Blackwood voluntarily choose to remain in their ruined home in We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Jackson, 1962).

While gothic protagonists can be men or women, many gothic stories feature young women terrorized, abandoned, threatened or distressed.  The gothic literary form flourished in an era when the status of women was changing rapidly, and many prominent authors of gothic fiction were women, from Ann Radcliffe to Charlotte Bronte.  Gothic literature is often romantic, if not sensual, and features women escaping from unwanted marriages or controlling partners (or parents).  The genre’s villainous barons and uncaring fathers serve to criticize patriarchal social conventions that trapped women in marriage, childbearing, and domestic life.

As the gothic literary genre evolved over time, it fused its eerie and supernatural elements with the “natural scientist,” a heroic figure of the 19th century – think of Charles Darwin or Lord Kelvin.  Dr. Henry Jekyll (M.D., D.C.L, LL.D., F.R.S., etc.) is a respected physician, at least until he turns into Mr. Hyde.  Dracula’s downfall is brought about by the learned Professor Abraham van Helsing (and Carmilla’s, in suspiciously similar circumstances, comes at the hands of the equally scholarly Baron Vordenburg).  These characters attempt to impose order on the madness and horror by explaining and documenting its origin and nature, but in the end, they are only partially successful; they cannot erase the fact of the evil, or turn the world back into one in which things like “vampires” do not exist.  This link, between science and magic or the ancient and the modern, is a signature element of gothic literature – especially that written around the fin de siecle, the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Often, of course, science is used not to illuminate the darkness but to spread it.  Stories like Frankenstein (Shelley, 1818) – widely considered the genesis of science fiction – featured doctors and scientists pushing their experiments too far, violating natural law with tragic and monstrous results.  Gothic literature therefore gave rise to both modern horror and modern science fiction.  Both the scientist explaining just what vampires do and how to slay them, and the scientist creating devils in his laboratory, are as gothic as it gets.

The Gothic Future

So is the 41st millennium “gothic,” in the literary sense?  Let’s see: we have a vast but faded Imperium, decaying into stagnant corruption; a hidden, dreadful horror that permeates all of reality, but is rarely seen directly and even more rarely understood; science which both pushes back the darkness and extends its reach; madness caused by exposure to the supernatural; and characters whose towering arrogance and callousness causes great suffering even as they stand against evil.

Sounds gothic to me!

At the same time, though, there are elements of the 40k setting that push back against this classification, not to mention the characteristics of the actual books set in this world.  The 41st millennium is, notwithstanding the luscious temptations of Slaanesh, mostly sexless.  It certainly lacks the romance and sensuality common to gothic fiction.  While some protagonists, especially Inquisitors, are certainly Byronic, most 41st-millennium Space Marine heroes (the real main characters of the setting) are much less complex.  While the Warp is certainly forbidden, it is not exactly shy; daemons cavort and dance on the page, and their taxonomy and powers are rigorously explained and detailed.  The 41st millennium lacks much of the mystery that permeates gothic fiction, and as a result, the sense of creeping, oppressive dread is often absent.  A dark shape moving at the foot of your bed and a screaming horde of bloodletters are both frightening, but in different ways, and only one of them is gothic.

This last issue is the strongest strike against the “40k-as-gothic-literature” thesis, and it is explained (at least in part) by the unique demands placed on 40k fiction.  These stories do not exist in a vacuum: they are tied to the tabletop wargame, and must correspond to what is known about the setting from the game.  It would be overly cynical to say that Black Library books exist to sell miniatures, but they certainly exist in a world in which miniatures are sold, and that colors what they can and cannot do.  When books are tied to a game in which every monster, hero, and man-at-arms has “stats,” it is hard to avoid the reader imagining them in terms of those “stats,” and that type of imagination – which places the characters in an objective schema and evaluates them according to a universal and understandable set of criteria – is anathema to the gothic setting.  In other words: it is hard to be afraid of a vague, amorphous shadow, fluttering between the high satin curtains of your boudoir, when you know that it has 3 wounds and a 5+ save.

That is not to say that 40k fiction cannot be gothic.  It certainly can, and in recent years, it has been.  And that brings us to Pariah.

Pariah: A True Gothic Novel

Published in 2012, Dan Abnett’s Pariah – the first in the long-awaited “Bequin trilogy” – was curiously unremarked-on.  Oh, it was mostly well-received, but perhaps it suffered by being released close to Know No Fear, which is to this day widely beloved as one of the best books in the entire Horus Heresy series.  Know No Fear was wall-to-wall bombastic combat between Legionaries; Pariah, by contrast, was slower, quieter, more meditative, with odd asides and a curious style that was unlike anything else in the Black Library catalog to date.  Not much happens in that book… well, that’s actually wrong, tons of stuff happens, but not much is explained.  Beta Bequin, escaping from a raid on the Maze Undue where she was raised to be an agent of the Inquisition, finds herself pursued by a rogue’s gallery of frightful antagonists through the ancient city of Queen Mab, as she tries to unravel the dual mysteries of her own identity and that of the King in Yellow.

Reading reviews of Pariah – both those contemporary to its publication and those written more recently – evidences a starkly divided fanbase.  The majority of readers loved it, but a substantial minority hated it.  Reading some of those reviews now (and not naming names) makes me feel like a bit of a snob, because it is hard to escape the conclusion that many of the readers who did not like Pariah simply did not get it.

It’s slower than most 40k books, but most 40k books barely spend any time developing characters or settings.  It’s more difficult to understand than most 40k books, because most 40k books are written like sets of stage directions for minis to act out.  The prose is more complex and more challenging than most 40k books, because, well…

This is not a criticism of Black Library as a whole, but 40k is, by and large, military sci-fi.  Military sci-fi is a fine genre with a lot to recommend it.  But Pariah is not military sci-fi.  It is, in fact, a Gothic novel, a real one, published in the year of our God-Emperor 2012.

Genre analysis is far more than a simple box-checking exercise, but look, we went to all the trouble of making that list earlier, so let’s check some boxes, for both Pariah and Penitent:

• Both are written in the first person.  Beta Bequin addresses the reader directly at parts, assuming their familiarity with the city of Queen Mab and the world of Sancour, digressing about places she has visited and people she has met.
• Beta is a doppelgänger, but she is not the only one.  Characters are often mistaken for other characters: Kara Swole is mistaken for Mam Mordaunt is mistaken for Lilean Chase.  Characters have dual identities, like Sister Bismillah/Medea Betancore and Sister Tharpe/Patience Kys.
• The young heroine is constantly under threat, menaced, abandoned by her friends, and forced to act on her own.  She stumbles from captivity to captivity, escaping only to be ensnared again.
• Queen Mab is a decaying, run-down city, an echo of its past glory.  From Feverfugue to the Holloways to the Maze Undue, the books take place in a series of ancient, moldering ruins.
• Much is unknown, and little of what is unknown is revealed.  Bequin does not know her real past, or the real purpose of the Maze Undue, or even the real names of most of her peers and enemies – she admits this.  And of course, looming over them, is the mysterious King In Yellow, whose identity is the secret at the heart of the book.  The purpose and true loyalty of Bequin’s various pursuers is only hinted at, never stated outright.  Throughout the book, true horror is just off the page: the contents of Constant Shadrake’s most scandalous paintings, the true appearance of Teke the Smiling; Bequin sees these things but does not or cannot describe them in detail.
• The “heroic” inquisitors are, by turns, gruff, sour, threatening, arrogant, proud, jealous, and callous, yet utterly devoted to their mission of safeguarding humanity.  If they are heroes at all, it is in the Byronic sense.
• Madness is always lurking: the madness of Fredrik Dance (a natural scientist whose observation of the heavens and skill with numbers has led him to unspeakable truths); the madness of Comus Nocturnus; the madness of Teke, of the bishop, and of so many others.  Characters are often thought mad, or asked if they are mad, and you can never be sure if the accusation is literal.
• Pariah, and especially its sequel Penitent, are suffused with an aura of dread.  Something terrible is growing on Sancour, or perhaps just sideways of it.  Bequin cannot name it – most people can’t – but it’s there, always, in the background.  Something terrible is coming.  Certain places and things in the books exude a supernatural terror, such as the dreadful King Door beneath the Queen Mab ossuary.

I mean, after a certain point, you have to just accept that this stuff is on purpose.  That, I think, explains Pariah‘s split reception.  People picked it up expecting one type of book and got another one altogether.  Pariah is, in my opinion, a top five Black Library book, and Penitent is in contention for the best book in the entire catalog, because both books are deeply literary: that is, they are situated within a literary canon, in dialogue with other books in that canon, with prose and plot and motifs chosen deliberately to cultivate a very specific mood and bring out very specific themes.  They’re not like other Black Library books – and that, to me, is the problem.

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