Gothic

Tartan Noir’s Origin   The Tartan Noir genre can be traced to Scotland and Scottish authors: right from James Hogg’s book, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) and RL Stevenson’s novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). While Hogg’s novel is an eccentric blend of the gothic, crime, horror, and psychology, Stevenson wrote about a split personality with a major twist-in-the-tale and metamorphosi...

Gothic fiction is usually illustrated along stereotypical lines. A gothic story is usually imagined to have a medieval setting of a Gothic castle, a damsel in distress, a villain with blood-curdling intent, and a knight in shining armor. While all of these could be true while cohesively presenting a gothic story, it would be unfair to write off this genre as puerile or kitsch. It is not as unappetizing as it appears to be. It has evolved over the ages and surprisingly, s...