Empowering Eerieness: How Gothic Romances Helped Alisa Alering Escape the Misery of a Small Town

It was desperately important that I draw myself out of this maze of misery in which I was caught.

This is a line from Victoria Holt’s gothic romance Daughter of Deceit but it pretty much summed up my own feelings about being a teenager living on a lonely Pennsylvania mountainside in the late 1980s.

Flopped on my bed in the house trailer I shared with my mom and brother, I devoured dozens of Holt’s gothic romances, titles like The Devil on Horseback, Mask of the Enchantress, and The Shivering Sands.

The gothic formula goes like this: a young woman falls on hard times and must make her way in the world alone. Usually as a governess, but sometimes as lady’s maid, music teacher, portrait painter, housekeeper, or companion for a strange, secretive family on an isolated estate far from her own family and friends.

Here in my cramped room on the mountainside, with the box fan whirring in the window to block out the view of the rusting horse trailer and the barrel where we burned our trash, I was isolated too. I had no neighbors, and I couldn’t get anywhere without a car—which I didn’t have. I spent most of my time trapped in a home surrounded by wilderness, just like those governesses in crumbling manors at the edge of the wily, windy moors.

My best friend had dumped me at the end of sixth grade the year before, and I entered junior high as a raw egg without a shell, a quivering yolk who tried to hide behind badly permed hair and drugstore eyeshadow. I saved every penny to buy the right clothes, the rugby-style Coca-Cola shirts, the high-top aerobic sneakers with Velcro tabs wrapping the ankle, the two pairs of slouchy socks to tuck my acid-washed jeans into.

No presentation at court, no tea with the vicar’s wife, or banquet at a medieval French chateau could have such inscrutable rules with such indelible consequences as the gladiatorial rankings of small-town junior high. Here, where almost everyone was working class, getting it right wasn’t as easy as money or brand names. It was about what church your family went to, what sports you played, how you pronounced words like “wash” and “creek.”

By comparison, how scary really was a sinister portrait with eyes that followed your movements in the dark? Or charred ruins, sinister monks, vindictive housekeepers, even the vengeful ghost of a first wife tragically drowned, compared to the wet smack of spitballs landing in your hair, your name scrawled in the boys’ bathroom, loud barks and hoots of “wildebeest” as you faced the tables in the cafeteria with your lunch tray gripped in trembling hands.

Most of the kids hurling insults in that cafeteria were destined to remain in our small mountain town for the rest of their lives, just like the hostile villagers who mutter sourly about the arrival of the second Mrs. DeWinter. But that wasn’t going to be me. I was going to escape this cramped maze of misery and find somewhere else. Somewhere I could live a big, romantic life.

For a young woman alone without wealth, power, or connections, the route to success—or even stability—is as perilous as stumbling along a narrow cliff-top path where one wrong step will send you plummeting to the wave-beaten rocks below.

I scooped fries, sliced onions, answered phones, and pulled espressos for the international banking elite. I let a cosmetics lab give me four patches of intense poison ivy on my forearms to test their (completely ineffective) remedies because it paid three hundred dollars.

I powered through eight-hour minimum-wage shifts at a bookstore on the strength of a single jumbo Snickers bar from the convenience store around the corner. I rated pornography for Google and helped old men in expensive suits unjam printers while they called me sweetheart.

I wanted a life of adventure and beauty, but the real shivering sands that threatened to drag me down were the grind and petty humiliation of trying to survive in a capitalist dystopia. The need to buy groceries and pay rent and to pretend to care enough about my job to not get fired, to pretend that any of it made any sense, that any of it mattered, was exhausting. Always my scarcity mindset kept me tense and terrified, glancing over my shoulder for the disaster licking at my heels.

I followed the example of the gothic heroine, doing what I must to keep myself housed and fed and clothed, but all the while prowling the dark corridors of my own imagination, lifting the lids of trunks, sweeping the veil from the painting, rattling the handle of the locked door, raising my candle flame to peer into dusty cellars, seeking answers, still trying to uncover my own truth of the world despite the shadows and deceptions.

For me that meant writing, even when I wanted desperately to be doing something else, to give up. Like Caroline Verlaine in The Shivering Sands, scouring ancient ruins to discover the truth about her sister’s disappearance, I would not let the mystery rest. I pulled out my notebook and I wrote.

I heeded the gothic lesson of exploration and followed my own heart down into the spiral of my past. By doing so I at last transcended my childhood maze of misery.

In creating what became my debut novel Smothermoss, I returned to that lonely Pennsylvania mountainside and rediscovered how much I loved it despite how suffocating it felt at the time. I revisited the scenes, people, emotions, and circumstances that had afflicted me and transformed them into a new world, one that operated according to my rules. I created two characters, sisters who have a much harder life than I ever did, bestowed upon them gifts of magic and wildness and set them loose to find their own path out.

The world I once lived in and have now recreated for them no longer exists. With the hyper-connected communication of our era, it’s difficult to be as cut off from information and knowledge as I once was.

But it’s still possible to struggle, to feel alone and confused, knowing you want desperately to get somewhere else, to change your situation, but not knowing how. And that’s why the gothic heroine clings to the top of the cliff, cloak flapping in the wind, shining her lantern into the dark.

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Smothermoss by Alisa Alering is available via Tin House.