SOURCE: Perry, J. Douglas, Jr. “Gothic as Vortex: The Form of Horror in Capote, Faulkner, and Styron.” In The Critical Response to Truman Capote, edited by Joseph J. Waldmeir and John C. Waldmeir, pp. 179-91. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1999.

In the following essay, originally published in Modern Fiction Studies in 1973, Perry proposes that in addition to the commonality of theme and images, American gothic fiction also uses traditional structures and techniques to create a concentric series of events, drawing the reader into an intense interaction between human communities that exist inside and outside the novel.

An examination of Capote, Faulkner, and Styron reveals that modern American gothic is not only a matter of theme or image, as Irving Malin suggests,¹ but of narrative form as well, that certain basic modes of rendering are traditional to gothic, and that in structure, as in theme and image, writers like Capote...