“Playing old Nancy Drew games as a gothic heroine”

by Ceregraphic | Mar 23, 2026

Its gameplay even replicates the form many gothic novels take: the epistolary.

Stop me if you’ve played this one before. You’re a heroine who arrives at a desolate location. Whether it’s a manor in the English moors, an exclusive boarding school upstate that happens to look like a castle, or a haunted traditional ryokan in Tokyo, these locales are as grand as they are unsettling. As you acquaint yourself with your new sublime surroundings and introduce yourself to a colorful cast of characters, you notice strange goings-on: weird noises in the night, people in shadowy cloaks moving about the halls, tales of monsters and ghosts and spook ’ems galore. Something is wrong. And you, Nancy Drew, must uncover the mystery behind it.

“A Bloody Brilliant Sentence: Erotic Linguistics in Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’”

by Ceregraphic | Feb 21, 2025

…I had not yet read horror written by another woman with such a rich, arresting evocation of female sexuality.

When I first read Angela Carter’s famous Gothic short story, “The Bloody Chamber,” it was midnight, or close enough to it. I was curled up in my lopsided twin-sized bed, the page illuminated solely by my bedside table lamp whose lampshade was imprinted with cut-out butterflies. The air in my basement bedroom was blessedly cool, a welcome reprieve from the Midwestern summer humidity. Though I tend to read while listening to music, as is my habit in all solitary activities, I didn’t turn on Spotify before cracking the already-broken spine of my used copy of The Bloody Chamber.