I've been Waiting So Long is written in the gothic style. It’s a genre that has always appealed to me with its special blend of creaky old houses, secret histories, crumbing families, winding stairways and long corridors, locked rooms and supernatural goings-on. It’s hard to pack all that into a short story so it helps that much of it is recognisable quite quickly, at least it is to anyone who quite likes being scared. 

My top 5 favourite gothic novels are: 

Derelict castles, decaying aristocratic families, glass eyes, guilt, depravity, candelabras, ravens, being buried alive, death by abortion, haunting, horror, insanity and much more …

Perhaps Poe hits peak gothic with The Tell-Tale Heart (1843), however all his stories are great if you’re in the right mood. Murders in the Rue Morgue is accepted as the first example of detective crime fiction. He famously wrote, ‘The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,’ but I forgive him. Those beautiful women often returned from the dead to star in Deadly Earnest’s Awful Movies, a Friday night treat in my juvenile years.

Rebecca features a vast sprawling house with endless rooms and corridors, secrets, sinister housekeeper, loneliness, haunting, gaslighting, murder. Manderley burns to the ground just like Thornfield Hall in Jane Eyre, a way to exorcise that first wife’s unwelcome traces. 

Du Maurier’s earlier novel, Jamaica Inn, also revisits Brontë-land (which never grows old). A plucky orphan heroine, foreboding moors, secret tunnels, creaking signs, sinister whispering, heightened danger and feeble lamplight holding back the gloom … Atmosphere is everything in a gothic novel. 

This book has my favourite protagonist of all time, the cheerfully amoral twelve-year-old Merricat. While the family’s ‘castle’ and the family within it continues to decay to the point where doors are falling off and the roof is caving in, Merricat’s scheming never concedes an inch. She is my kind of heroine, ‘triumphant even as [she’s] sinking’, as Charlotte Wood wrote in her kind endorsement for Cautionary Tales for Excitable Girls.

Shirley Jackson, an innovator in so many ways, truly advanced the gothic narrative in the character of Merricat. Children in gothic literature are typically weird, but Merricat is diabolical, ruthless and indomitable. She’s the best!

Rhys’s feminist prequel to Jane Eyre gives voice and basic justice to the sketchily-drawn bestial character of Bertha Mason, first wife of Edward Rochester and archetypal madwoman in the attic. Sargasso is lush and creates a new kind of ominous where bright light, voodoo and sapping heat replace the darkness and gloom of the English and European gothic tradition. 

Antoinette’s story is always framed against what we know will happen to her. The marriage she hopes will save her in Sargasso ends in Jane Eyre with her monstrous purple face, black eyebrows and bloodshot eyes looming over the terrified Jane who is planning to marry Rochester in the morning. But without a veil, because Bertha/Grace Poole/Antoinette, after trying on the veil in front of a mirror, tears it apart before leaving to set fire to the house. 

The veil tearing made a deep impression on me as a teenager, and I liked to act it out on sleepovers and school camps. I love this book.