SOURCE: "Isn't It Gothic?" in The Georgia Review, Vol. XLII, No. 4, Winter, 1988, pp. 840-49.

Johnson is an American novelist, short story writer, poet and critic. Below, he provides a stylistic analysis of Mourner at the Door.

The attempt to define and evaluate literary Gothicism has created an ongoing controversy among critics and scholars, primarily because the term "Gothic" has achieved the kind of connotative vagueness—rather like that other freefloating term, "Romantic"—that inspires its use in a startling variety of contexts. In his recent study of Gothic fiction, In the Circles of Fear and Desire (University of Chicago Press, 1985), William Patrick Day insists that too often critics "expand the term to a point where it is no longer useful" and that "ambiguity, a conflict between fear and terror, does not make a novel Gothic." Yet even Day acknowledges that the Gothic is the most enduring fictional genre...