There are more gaps in our knowledge of the past than there are known facts, and this means that the writer of historical fiction need never be without a story. Take an event such as the French Revolution. So much is written about it--dates, reasons, personalities--but if we zoom in from the grand panorama, we suddenly find more and more spaces where no information is recorded. The French Revolution impacted on diverse individuals in material ways. We all know what Robespierre did, but we could hypothesize about any of the thousand personal reasons he did it: to prove his worthiness to a severe father; for the love of a woman he could never have; to fulfill a pact with satanic powers. Choose your genre and start speculating. And beyond the key players like Robespierre, there are thousands upon thousands of unknown individuals who lived untold stories. Every man, woman and child--rich, poor, loved, despised, happy, sad--had a life, a story. The possibilities are quite literally endless. If I think about it too hard it can make me anxious..

History appeals to me for many reasons. The frocks, for instance. Let's not underestimate the thrill of the frocks. I should be ashamed to admit it, but one of the first stops I make when researching a historical story is to that section of the library where the costume books are shelved. I know a kirtle from a girdle, a headrail from a barbette, worsted wool from russet. And I love to walk right past the twentieth-century compiled social histories of a period and head straight for the old diaries, journals and letter collections of people who actually lived in the time. Some of their turns of phrase are priceless. While researching the 1790s for my third novel, I came across the diary of a young woman who said of Marie Antoinette's execution, "today the unfortunate queen of France is without a head." It is this kind of witnessed detail which demonstrates the infinite perspectives available in any moment of history. We are unable to point to a period of time and say we know definitely and specifically what was going on; but we are able to send our imaginations into every unlit corner.

As a writer of supernatural thrillers, history's essential ambiguity has been a rich vein for me to mine. In so doing, I'm following in a long and honoured tradition. The original Gothic novels of the late eighteenth-century traded heavily on the mysterious nature of the past. They were usually given historical settings and took place among ruined castles and abbeys. Horace Walpole, who wrote the first Gothic novel in 1764 (we know it was the first because it said "A Gothic Story" on the title page), lived in a faux medieval castle where he set his book. (In fact, it was popular at the time for wealthy families to build a "folly," or a fake set of ruins, in the garden--I'd like to see that on Backyard Blitz).

The Gothic also dealt with tortuous family histories and characters who upset the usual past-to-present flow of time. The dead, we all know, are supposed to be consigned to history, to the past, finished, over and out. The appearance of the ghost of the Bleeding Nun in Lewis's high camp The Monk is an instance where history refuses to remain confined safely to the past. Likewise, the monster in Shelley's Frankenstein is assembled from bits of dead people then imbued with unnatural life. The Wandering Jew in Godwin's St Leon lives on and on forever, his lifetime and knowledge spanning impossible centuries. None of these characters will stay behind the line we like to imagine between past and present.

Even the structure of these stories demonstrates our inability to put history permanently behind us. Often in the Gothic, one narrative will be interrupted by another, a character telling a story of what has happened before. In Maturin's hysterical Melmoth the Wanderer, there are no less than five "stories-within-stories" open at once, as character after character interrupts one tale to tell another that preceded it, disappearing into the distance like reflections in parallel mirrors.

The Gothic spawned many of the other popular genres of today. The amateur sleuth determined to get to the bottom of the Gothic mystery grew, via Edgar Allen Poe, into crime fiction. The breathless vulnerable orphan, prey to the sexual attentions of a powerful man, evolved into the romance novel heroine. The imaginings of the past, made more sophisticated by Sir Walter Scott, eventually became the historical novel. And the clanking chains, ghosts, decayed bodies and hooded figures in the mist were developed into the horror thriller, still called Gothic today.

Gothic is always most fashionable at the end of a century. The popularity of the genre in the 1790s was unparalleled, with an estimated 40% of all books published boasting a Gothic plot. In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries the spooky tale experienced a resurgence: in Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde, in Stoker's Dracula, in the murder-by-gaslight thrill and terror of the Jack-the-Ripper murders. And now, at the turn of the twenty-first century, it is popular once again. There are few authors which are household names, but Stephen King and Anne Rice are two of them. Recent movie history is replete with Gothic trappings, from the Vampire Lestat, to a boy who sees dead people, to the trembling heroine of The Others. It seems at that key moment in history--that fin de siècle, that turn from one century to the next--history itself becomes monstrous, and anxieites about distinguishing past from present take hold of popular imagination.

Sometimes it seems to me that the present is a very boring time to live. Neon has replaced gaslight, and everything is laid bare under the cold eye of science. Medical technology researchers at Laurentian University are working on a "God theory." By using transcranial magnetic stimulation, they are able to reproduce feelings usually associated with mystical experience: the sense of an invisible presence, a conviction of belonging in the universe, an ineffable awe of something spiritually overwhelming. They hypothesise that perhaps any instance of the supernatural may actually be caused by magnetic interference. How very very dull of them! Science and humankind's obsessive drive towards understanding everything means that light is shone into every corner. I much prefer the past as a place to germinate a story. Back then, there were alcoves for shadows to collect and for secrets to hide. Back then, there was still plenty of room for mysteries.

(© Kim Wilkins 2003)