
Louise Welsh's Queer Gothic Reading List inspired by The Second Cut
By Canongate
Louise Welsh's Queer Gothic Reading List inspired by The Second Cut

Gothic is a genre that embraces transgression. From its earliest days, when queerness was taboo, authors and readers have been thrilled and validated by queer themes and characters in gothic books. Sometimes they nestle codified within the pages, only recognised by those in the know. Other times they blaze forth, embracing their sexuality and defying offense. Here are a few of my favourite queer gothic texts.

The Monk: Annotated Edition
Matthew Gregory Lewis
£7.99 £7.59The Monk is lurid to the point of absurdity. Matthew Lewis dashed it off in ten days and managed to get just about every affront to contemporary morals into his text, voyeurism, incest, rape, murder, transgendering, same-sex desire, S&M, matricide, devil-assisted-sex are painted in vivid colours. The central protagonist Ambrosio is a hot and initially pious monk who goes to the bad quickly and spectacularly. Not for the easily offended. Perfect for readers with a love of cartoon excess.

Carmilla: The dark sapphic romance that inspired Dracula
Sheridan Le Fanu
£10.99 £10.44Before Dracula there was Carmilla, a beautifully constructed tale written by candlelight. If you like lesbian vampires, and what’s not to like? This is highly recommended. A favourite of Hammer Horror who added backcombed bouffants and nylon negligées to the mix.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: New Edition of Stevenson’s Classic of Psychological Suspense
Robert Louis Stevenson
£6.99 £6.64Who is the evil Mr Hyde and what does he have on respectable Dr Jekyll that makes the doctor pay his debts and allow him unfettered access to his laboratory? Read this novel like a Victorian, unaware of the denouement to the plot and this tale of two men inextricably bound together, traversing foggy London streets, becomes very queer indeed.

The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
£7.99 £7.59Who doesn’t have an ugly portrait of themselves in their metaphorical attic? The Portrait of Dorian Gray was dangerously decadent at a time when being convicted of homosexuality carried a heavy sentence. With lines like, ‘There was that wretched boy in the Guards who committed suicide. You were his great friend. There was Sir Henry Ashton, who had to leave England, with a tarnished name. You and he were inseparable’, Oscar Wilde’s portrayal of homosexuality had potential to get him into big trouble long before the Marquess of Queensberry did his damndest.

Dracula
Bram Stoker
£16.99 £16.14‘This man belongs to me’, Count Dracula declares as three ravishing female vampires attempt, and almost succeed, in enticing Jonathan Harker into a blood-letting orgy. When the women object the count promises them that, ‘when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will’. Sensational stuff that suggests some Victorians were not as buttoned up as they made out.

The Haunting of Hill House
Shirley Jackson
£9.99 £9.49The Haunting of Hill House suggests that the nuclear family might be the most horrifying trap of all. The push-pull between sexy Theodora (who has a ‘friend’ waiting at home for her) and virginal Eleanor, is amplified by the strange noises and supernatural phenomenon that haunt Hill House. Written at a time when lesbianism was still considered a mental disorder by the medical establishment and society at large, contemporary discomfort with the power of female sexuality rattles the walls and threatens to tear Hill House apart.

Interview With The Vampire: Volume 1 in series
Anne Rice
£9.99 £9.49Interview with a Vampire introduces Southern gentlemen Louis and Lestat, young sensitive, good-looking vampires who still possess a lot of bite. Lush and louche, a wonderfully homoerotic book whose preoccupation with mortality and blood prefigures the devastation of HIV and Aids in the 1980s.

Skin Folk: Stories
Nalo Hopkinson
£16.95 £16.10Specifically, the story A Habit of Waste. Cynthia is on the bus when she sees her old body climb on board. She doesn’t like what its new owner has done to it. An original evocation of the doppelganger myth that subtly recalls Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, A Habit of Waste is a sharp and witty observation of the corrosive effect of beauty norms and ongoing colonisation.
Discover The Second Cut, A stylish, atmospheric detective story with shades of the Gothic – from the author of the award-winning cult classic The Cutting Room
Auctioneer Rilke has been trying to stay out of trouble, keeping his life more or less respectable. Business has been slow at Bowery Auctions, so when an old friend, Jojo, gives Rilke a tip-off for a house clearance, life seems to be looking up. The next day Jojo washes up dead.
Jojo liked Grindr hook-ups and recreational drugs – is that the reason the police won’t investigate? And if Rilke doesn’t find out what happened to Jojo, who will?
Thrilling and atmospheric, The Second Cut delves into the dark side of twenty-first century Glasgow. Twenty years on from his appearance in The Cutting Room, Rilke is still walking a moral tightrope between good and bad, saint and sinner.