Starling House

With its many uncanny elements of hauntings, secret histories, and hidden crimes, Starling House represents a prime example of the subgenre of Southern Gothic literature. The broader Gothic genre first emerged in 18th-century British literature and is characterized by its gloomy tone, heightened emotions, and dark aesthetics, as well as its fixation upon supernatural beings, dilapidated settings, and intensely melodramatic portrayal of mystery and fear. Once transplanted to the United States, these typical Gothic elements blended with the local culture and landscape to give rise to the Southern Gothic subgenre. Early examples of this new trend became prominent during the 19th century, when social and political tensions between the North and South were on the rise. True to form, both the Gothic and Southern Gothic genres tend to deal with themes of terror, otherness, and the underlying fear of change; in Southern Gothic literature, such themes are often tied to the South’s fraught history with enslavement and the changes that came after its abolition. Many marginalized writers, particularly women, have used the Southern Gothic genre to express elements of rage, fear, and longing that are otherwise concealed beneath a veneer of civilized behavior. For example, authors such as Flannery O’Connor, Harper Lee, and Eudora Welty have all used the genteel yet unsettling conventions of the Southern Gothic literary style to illustrate and critique the grimmer realities of oppression in everyday life.

As an inheritor of this long literary tradition, Starling House also includes many of the most common symbols, themes, and settings of the Southern Gothic genre. For example, the biblical significance of its small town setting of Eden, Kentucky, is typical of the genre’s use of religious concepts to add an ominous weight to otherwise mundane details, thereby increasing the suspense, foreshadowing, and understated drama of the story in question. Similarly, Starling House itself also fulfills many of the stereotypes of classic Gothic literature, echoing a long tradition of stories that feature old haunted houses, many of which possess a near-sentient presence of their own. Thus, the author creates an air of mystery around Starling House and its inhabitants, and the curse that lingers over Eden (and the powerful Gravely family in particular) also mirrors the ancestral curses that haunt the families of classic Gothic literature. Yet the power that the Gravely family has over the community is meant to be far more terrifying than any of the town’s legendary ghosts, and the preternatural secrets within and beneath Starling House prove to be far less monstrous in comparison.