it's a gothic if we say it's a gothic...

The Lair of the White Worm...as gothic.  Paperback Library was perhaps the most opportunistic about  this kind of repackaging....
































































They at Paperback Library were particularly fond of conflating the original sort of Gothic fiction with post-Dark Shadows "supermarket gothics"...

Recycled for one of DC's short-lived gothic comics...

But PL wasn't alone...the first Award edition explicitly labeled this as a gothic...cover by Jeff Jones.




















































And if gothic readers were disappointed, as they were, by a fairly standard suspense novel...

...imagine what the innocent gothic fan made of "Carmilla"...

A Weird Tales serial, in boards from Arkham House, that *might* just fit if you squint at it the right way...

As Kelly Robinson mentions in comments below, Dell Books decided to package this Newbery Award-winning YA historical novel as a gothic without tagging it in any way as a gothic (or a YA) for at least one edition that saw multiple printings as a "Fic" title (on the spine) and with gothics advertised on the back pages...the back cover headline is "Prisoner in a House of Strangers"...Dell also had a Yearling edition (digest-sized YA line) in print simultaneously.  Pretty outrageous, but as Ed Gorman has mentioned to me in email, paperback publishers could routinely look forward to over 100,000-copy sales for any gothic by the early 1970s.

For some good reading on the subject, including the repackaging of other sorts of suspense and horror books to sell them to the Phyllis Whitney-style gothic audience, please see this excerpt from Joanna Russ's essay "Somebody's Trying to Kill Me and I Think It's My Husband: The Modern Gothic" as collected in Russ's To Write Like a Woman.

The Vault of Evil post that inspired this one...

Late additions: Bantam 1972 paperback reprint:

Paperback Library again...1967 reprint:

FFB: Romances That Dare Not Speak...: Kate Wilhelm, Joyce Carol Oates, Margaret Atwood, Maggie Gee, Jack Finney, Richard Matheson, Joanna Russ, et al.

I've been reading romance fiction starting certainly no later than greatly enjoying Jack Finney's "The Love Letter" at about age nine (collected in the Finney volume above), and romance plays an important role in much fiction aimed at men as well as women...but these novels are, in whole or in part, romances in the sense of being primarily or significantly about the relationships at the center of them...but no one dare call them by that name (except perhaps the Matheson and the Finney; the former has been published in paperback with a romance tag), as they don't actually follow the Strictures of commercial romance publishing.

If I'd ever gotten very far with John Updike's Couples, it might be here, too. None of these has the cover from the editions I have, except the blurry Listen, Listen image (which includes "The Winter Beach," the novella from Redbook later expanded to novel length as Welcome, Chaos).

So...why are they romances? Well, On Strike Against God is in large part a contemporary mimetic analog of one of the threads of Russ's The Female Man, dealing with a mature woman trying to decide if she can, ethically, indulge her desire for an affair with a much younger woman; Solstice, the first Oates novel I read, is also a lesbian romance albeit a far less cheerful one (we are talking Oates, here). Wilhelm's novella and novel both, as do many Wilhelm works, mixes tendencies from all sorts of fiction, with a protagonist in both versions here who is beguiled by the kind of condescending, yet dashing, man of action who tends to Learn Better in commerially-tailored romance fiction. The Gee is about the end of the affair (hey, where's Graham Greene here?) and is arrayed cleverly, broken into three sections and multiple chapters within...while Lady Oracle touches on metafiction (if not as much as Surfacing), while being about a romance-fiction writer who finds herself in a mildly relevant situation.

Still haven't seen the tv film from "The Love Letter" and haven't sat still for the film from Bid Time Return.

For less tardy Friday "Forgotten" Books, please see the running log at George Kelley's website.

Two bonus "repurposing" packages...Conjure Wife and O.G. (original gothic) Northanger Abbey offered to the Victoria Holt audience...wonder how they did in such new bottles? (The Austen courtesy Kate Laity's blog):



Sadly, the brilliant Diane and Leo Dillon cover for The Crystal Crow, iirc, by Joan Aiken, a book a bit more in the tradition of Du Maurier's Rebecca, seems to be eluding me (no longer, please see below)...as publisher Ace Books used to note, they were the First in Gothics of the sort that resurged in the '60s, and were apparently the inventors of the cover format with a woman in foreground, vaguely sinister man in background, and mansion or castle with one brightly lit window in further background...