You Know You Love It: A Guest Post by KJ Charles
Mystery, horror, a second-chance romance — all happening in a Gothic mansion. Combine some terrible distant family members, an ex-lover and a string of bizarre happenings, and you get one chillingly entertaining read. Read on for an exclusive essay from KJ Charles on writing All of Us Murderers.
Paperback
$13.49
$17.99
All of Us Murderers
All of Us Murderers
By KJ Charles
In Stock Online
Paperback
$13.49
$17.99
“Wildly inventive, twisty tour de force”—BookPage
The lush Gothic drama of Crimson Peak meets the murderous intrigue of Knives Out with an LGBTQIA+ love story to die for from award-winning author KJ Charles.
WHO WILL SURVIVE LACKADAY HOUSE?
“Wildly inventive, twisty tour de force”—BookPage
The lush Gothic drama of Crimson Peak meets the murderous intrigue of Knives Out with an LGBTQIA+ love story to die for from award-winning author KJ Charles.
WHO WILL SURVIVE LACKADAY HOUSE?
I love a good 1970s Gothic romance. You approach the big scary house past nightfall, with the trees whispering around you and the cold wind prickling your skin. The door creaks open before you get there, spilling a blaze of candlelight into the darkness, and a beautiful girl in a weather-inappropriate diaphanous gown comes fleeing down the steps. And behind her, silhouetted in the doorway, you see the severe, remote, yet gorgeous master of the house, scowling down…
Ah, come on, you know you love it.
Romance novels very often use tropes (enemies to lovers, brother’s best friend, secret baby, only one bed). Sometimes they use multiple tropes and you get a title like Pregnant by Her Millionaire Enemy Boss. However, if you want to roll around in tropes like a toddler in glitter glue, Gothic novels are where it’s at. Some Gothic tropes have been around since Horace Walpole created the genre with The Castle of Otranto in 1764, others have accreted in the popular imagination since, like barnacles on a ship. You don’t have to have read Dracula, seen a Hammer horror movie, or explored the oeuvre of Barbara Michaels to understand what it means when the heavy door swings shut behind the ingenue. You know to get worried when the gaslight flickers or the camera/narration dwells a bit too long on a portrait; you don’t believe for a second that the mysterious footsteps in the corridor or the strange sounds from the attic are just rats; and you wouldn’t trust the silent and disapproving housekeeper as far as you could throw her.
Yes, very silly. But, as with all genre fiction, the excesses and tropes of the Gothic novel have always been used as cover for writing about real concerns: the rights of women, the structure of the family and patriarchal control, the grip of religion, domestic abuse, illicit or repressed sexuality, and much more. (If you want to study the psychological repercussions of collapsing empire and social upheaval at the turn of the 20th century, start with pulp Gothic fiction like The Beetle.)
In All Of Us Murderers, I wanted to touch on a lot of serious things—the ongoing legacy of the British slave trade, the harm done by patriarchy and false morality, the difference it can make if we recognise other people’s struggles and extend kindness—all of which boil down to the fact that selfishness is next door to cruelty. You don’t have to be moustache-twirlingly evil to destroy other people’s lives: sufficient selfishness will do it very easily indeed.
Serious things, and not less serious because I wrapped them up in a tropetastic gay lovers-reunited romance with murder, mystery, follies in the garden, ghostly monks in the hallways, and something nasty in the attic. After all, the greatest trope of the Gothic novel is that you can’t trust things to be as they seem…
