Once Upon A Gothic
An interview with authors Heather Webb, Kris Waldherr, Paulette Kennedy, and Nancy Bilyeau
I’m beyond thrilled to talk with four authors whose work I adore and admire. They’re all taking part in an ambitious project called Once Upon a Gothic. SO perfect as we head into Spooky season!
These books are only available through Kickstarter, and they are SO cool. Here’s the details:
Once Upon a Gothic beckons you to explore four hauntingly beautiful Tête-Bêche flip books, each pairing a classic Gothic masterpiece with an original retelling written through the eyes of its most compelling female characters:
The Last Bride by Paulette Kennedy reveals the sensual, chilling tale of Ileana, Dracula’s final bride. Book includes full text of Dracula by Bram Stoker.
The Heiress of Northanger Abbey by Nancy Bilyeau imagines Catherine Morland’s fate beyond her fairy-tale wedding to Henry Tilney. Book includes full text of Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.
Unnatural Creatures by Kris Waldherr reawakens Frankenstein by bringing to life the poignant experiences of Victor’s mother Caroline, bride Elizabeth, and servant Justine. Book includes full text of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
The Phantom’s Apprentice by Heather Webb casts Christine Daaé as a heroine of agency with dreams of her own amidst the shadows of the opera. Book includes full text of The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux.
I loved the original stories and of course I had to know more about the way that these authors decided to tell them anew. So I asked!
1. What drew you to reimagine this particular classic gothic tale, and what aspects of the original story felt ripe for exploration from a different perspective?
Nancy Bilyeau: ‘Northanger Abbey’ is like no other Jane Austen novel. She is telling the story of a girl coming of age and falling in love amid obstacles and misunderstandings. In that way it is just like the others. But Austen is also using the story to poke fun at the then-popular Gothic genre. It has a satire level to it. The best selling author of the time was Anne Radcliffe, who had written The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian, and other novels. They revolved around young women plunged into danger and in “Gothic” settings: crumbling castles containing secret passageways, false shelves in the dresser, and literally skeletons in the closet. The main character of the novel, Catherine Morland, is eager to be plunged into such a castle herself. Jane Austen uses Northanger Abbey to make fun of those Gothic tropes–and yet, there are certain challenges that Catherine faces, including sudden exile from a large manor house and a dangerous carriage ride, that borrow from those same tropes. As someone who enjoys reading and writing genre fiction, I’m fascinated by a novel that both satirizes a frightening castle but also makes use of it in the narrative to drive tension.
Heather Webb: The first time I saw The Phantom of the Opera on stage was when I was 16 years old. I found myself falling in love with this dark sumptuous story, and it stayed with me ever since! When I started thinking about writing a retelling, I knew I needed to both rewatch the stage production and also read the original novel to see where Andrew Lloyd Webber had taken liberties with the original text. There were quite a few differences, but what struck me more than the differences was the way in which the characterizations had been changed. I was also quite surprised by how one-dimensional the female characters were in both, and I say that while still very much loving the stage production in particular. Christine Daae is a simpering heroine that is at the mercy of the men who manipulate or rescue her over and over again. Gag! That’s definitely not my kind of heroine. I sat down add dimension to this woman with her own dreams and her own agency. I also noticed there were elements of illusions and spiritualism in the original, so I leaned into this aspect. This is how I came to a stronger Christine, who realizes she doesn't want to be on stage competing with one of the best opera singers in history, she wants to be one of the first female illusionists.
Paulette Kennedy: I’ve always been intrigued by the three nameless, seductive vampire brides in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Who were they, before they were vampires? So, when Kris approached me about this project, and invited me to take part, it gave me the chance to reimagine these women’s lives and give them the kind of voice and agency missing from the original novel, while still staying true to the world Stoker created. The Last Bride begins shortly before Jonathan Harker’s arrival at Dracula’s castle, and ends after Dracula returns to Transylvania from being abroad in England. This span of time enabled me to imagine what the brides might have gotten up to in Dracula’s absence. In the novel, I center his youngest bride, Ileana, a reluctantly made vampire whose ethical and moral dilemma around her vampiric nature creates internalized conflict. In giving her a voice, I was able to explore aspects of feminine agency, sexual awakening, and her identity outside of her relationship with Dracula. I kept some of the original dialogue from Dracula in the story, and Stoker’s structure is still given pride of place in this retelling, including epistolary elements and several of the more dramatic scenes, each reimagined from Ileana’s point-of-view, which was fun.
Kris Waldherr: Ever since I first read it at the age of twelve, Frankenstein has been one of my favorite novels. Even now, I can recall how viscerally it affected me, especially since my prior exposure to Mary Shelley’s story involved the pop culture version of a green monster with bolts on his neck. Since then, I’ve reread Frankenstein more times than I can count. During each of these readings, the story shifted for me depending where I was in my life. For example, as a child, I saw Victor as the monster’s victim; as a young adult, a warning about the dangers of playing god with science. However, once I became a mother, I realized that Frankenstein is ultimately a cautionary tale about bad parenting. Most of the characters have been orphaned or abandoned or abused by their parents, especially the monster by Victor, which leads to tragedy all around. I also noticed how the three primary female characters—Victor’s mother Caroline, his bride Elizabeth, and servant Justine—were portrayed as reflections of Victor’s narcissism, rather than as fully realized women. This became the angle I wanted to explore in Unnatural Creatures.
2. Each of your novels centers women who were secondary or unnamed characters in the original works. How did you go about developing these characters' voices and motivations beyond what was given in the source material?
Nancy Bilyeau: Well, in ‘Northanger Abbey,’ Catherine Morland was the main character and dominated the story. In my sequel, she is also the main character–I have switched from the third person to the first person and told it through her perspective totally. The big difference is that in NA, Catherine is 17 and not a mature 17 in some respects. Yet she gets engaged and perhaps even marries before she is 18. In my novel, I am jumping forward 22 years. I thought deeply about who Catherine Morland was at 17 and who she might have been on the brink of turning 40. What would marriage and motherhood have done to her? What strengths would she find in herself? Would there be any lasting result to marrying into a family in which her father-in-law tried to throw her out of the house when he found out she wasn’t an heiress? And regarding Northanger Abbey itself, a large and prestigious manor house in the country, what would it be like for her to marry into the Tilney family with members who were all obsessed with the house and subservient to the father to one degree or another? How would this affect her marriage and her children’s lives?
Heather Webb: This is the biggest struggle about writing a retelling. How much of the original source material do you keep and how much do you sidestep? I duse it as a scaffolding, and build a fresh story around it, working to give each of the beloved characters new dimensions. I wrestled with this a ton, because people who love the stage production, for example, have fallen for this idea of a twisted dark love story between Erik and Christine, but in the book, he is killer and a stalker, in other words, a pretty twisted human being. Carlotta, too, was very one-dimensional in the book as nothing but a primadonna and a bully. I explored her backstory more and worked to humanize her. I did the same with Raoul so that he's not just a cute rich boy that falls in love with a pretty girl at first sight. It definitely took some doing. I think I wrote fifteen drafts of this novel, which tops almost every other book I've ever written. I wanted to honor the original masters but create a compelling story for a modern reader.
Paulette Kennedy: It was really fun to craft the personalities of each bride. I took my time creating their personality profiles before I started writing. From Stoker’s original, I surmised that there was a bit of a power struggle/rivalry going on between the three “sisters” and so you see that coming out in The Last Bride as well. At one point Ileana is compared to the tarot’s Queen of Swords, and that is very much her personality. Reserved, intelligent, and stoic, but with an intrinsic sense of justice and an inner warmth that emerges once she feels safe and loved. Afina is the classic eldest sister–motherly, but a bit controlling. And Cosmina, as the middle sister, is always trying to claw her way to the top. She is very catlike and cunning. She was one of my favorite characters to write. I kept much of Stoker’s original structure and timeline in place at the beginning and end of my retelling, but underpinned the events of Dracula with the brides’ emotional development and perspective. After Dracula departs for England, I got to really “play” with the narrative and imagine the ways in which the brides might embrace their sense of freedom while Dracula is abroad.
Kris Waldherr: My intent in writing Unnatural Creatures was to reveal the untold stories of the three women closest to Victor Frankenstein — Justine Moritz, Elizabeth Lavenza, and Caroline Frankenstein — while incorporating the historical events that most likely coincided with Shelley’s novel. To develop their characters, I reread all four editions of Frankenstein to pull as much information as I could about each woman. I also spent a lot of time reading biographies of Mary Shelley and her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, who died days after her daughter’s birth. The more I read, the more convinced I became that, with Frankenstein, Mary Shelley was exploring her own complicated legacy as a motherless daughter as well as a bereft mother herself. Her first child, a daughter born premature in 1815, died several week after birth. Soon after, Shelley wrote in her journal of a dream where “my little baby came to life again; that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed it before the fire, and it lived.”
3. Gothic literature has always grappled with themes of power, agency, and societal constraints. How do these themes manifest in your retelling, particularly through your female protagonists?
Nancy Bilyeau: One of the challenges of Northanger Abbey is how much Catherine Morland is a product of the late 18th century/early 19th century. She is not interested in having agency in anything beyond falling in love with an attractive young man and marrying. She is not as brainy as Elinor in Sense and Sensibility or as confident as Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. She comes from a humbler family than the MCs of Emma or Persuasion. Catherine is very conventional and sheltered, and the only thing that makes her different than other pretty seventeen-year-olds of that time and place is her passion for reading Gothic fiction. But there’s nothing wrong with Catherine being so traditional. That is consistent with the period in which Jane Austen wrote. By 1820, the year that The Heiress of Northanger Abbey takes place, women’s scope of possibility was widening a little. Mary Wollstonecraft had been published, for example. Her daughter, Mary Shelley, had just published Frankenstein. Women painters were finding success. So I wanted Catherine’s daughter, Phoebe, now 17 herself, to strive for different things for herself, and for mother and daughter to go through a journey together, one that will test their bond, as love, money, and Gothic literature all play a role. But it’s not just a matter of a conventional mother and a rebellious daughter engaged in a struggle for power. Catherine and Phoebe Tilney are more complicated than that in my story. I gave them many layers.
Heather Webb: You very much see Christine Daae begin as a naive young woman who is being paraded around as a potential bride at first, but she soon takes matters into her own hands. She auditions for a part at the opera house and wins it as an understudy, but it’s temporary. Over time she realizes what she really wants and fights her way to a different life, to the life she wants.
Paulette Kennedy: Transformation is a big theme in the novel, which might seem obvious since we’re talking about vampires! But as I am now undergoing one of the biggest transformations of my own life–menopause–I wanted to bring some of those themes of awakening into The Last Bride. The brides are a bit trapped in time, being Dracula’s consorts, and as such, their reclamation of their own power and agency is different than the modern woman’s might be. For example, all Ileana wants is a simple life. She’s tired of the glamour of vampirism. Her relationship with Sorina is an awakening–the catalyst for her to examine her future with new eyes. She realizes that her transformation will be painful, and difficult, and may cost her dearly, but she’s willing to undertake the risks in order to find her way back to who she was before she became a vampire.
Kris Waldherr: One of the biggest challenges in Unnatural Creatures was acknowledging how constrained my three heroines were by their time, while giving them some agency within the story world that Shelley created. For example, Victor’s mother Caroline had no choice but to marry Frankenstein senior after her father foolishly bankrupted the family. However, she uses her exalted position to take in two girls, Elizabeth and Justine, to grant them a better life and, in the case of Elizabeth, essentially adopts her. As for Justine and Elizabeth, their expressions of agency are ones that I’d hate to spoil for readers. ;-)
4. What research challenges did you face in bringing these historical periods to life, and did you discover anything that surprised you about the era or the original author's world?
Nancy Bilyeau: When I write historical fiction, I research real places and people who lived in a certain time, even if my main characters are from my imagination. For The Heiress of Northanger Abbey, I needed to research some places that are very real, such as Bath, where more than half of Jane Austen’s book takes place. I set several important chapters of my book there, which I enjoyed. For Jane Austen lovers, Bath is such a special place. But “Northanger Abbey” the manor house is not a real place, nor is Henry Tilney’s rectory in Wooston, nor Catherine’s home village of Fullerton. It felt strange to write about these fictional places that I did not invent, though I enjoyed the challenge. I needed to break away, though. Most of the second half of my novel is set in Devon, where Isabella Thorpe, who was a secondary character in Northanger Abbey, has married and is raising her family. It felt liberating to set loose my characters–some of them originated by Austen and some of them entirely my own–in a place that Austen did not write about. I felt the need to run free! And for a Gothic story, there are few places riper with possibility than Dartmoor in Devon.
Heather Webb: You know…I didn’t face challenges in this particular aspect of the writing process because the world-building and research is one of my favorite parts of writing historical fiction. I had a cheat, though! I love Paris, and I especially love Belle Epoque Paris and had already written another novel set during that time period. I was eager to return to that time through the eyes of a different character's perspective and experience. I also had a blast visiting the Palais Garnier, which is one of the earlier opera houses there in Paris that’s now used solely for the ballet. The architecture is absolutely stunning and the detail inside each room of that building is breathtaking. It rivals Versailles in that way, in my opinion. I also bought a couple of books on the history of illusions and that was a blast too. I ended up at some magic shows for both research and for fun. In terms of surprise about the original author, I was bowled over by the scope of Gaston LeRoux’s lifestyle! He was one of the very first stunt journalists and would dress up in disguise to interview people, or to sneak in where he hadn’t been admitted, etc. I actually tried to integrate him into the story in a clever way and couldn’t make it work, alas.
Paulette Kennedy: I wish I would have been able to go to Romania before I wrote this retelling as part of my research, but it wasn’t in the cards. Instead, I relied on Stoker’s original text to inform the backdrop of the story. Surprisingly, Stoker himself had never been to Romania when he wrote Dracula, yet he imagined it almost perfectly. The accuracy is astounding, so I felt fairly confident in following his blueprint. I also hired an expert sensitivity reader from Romania, Dr. Ligia Buzan, to review the manuscript for cultural and geographical accuracy. Dr. Buzan studied under the late Dr. Radu Florescu, the foremost Dracula scholar in the world, so her feedback was invaluable. It heartened me that she felt transported back to Romania while reading The Last Bride, and her notes on language and customs added richness and depth to my worldbuilding.
Kris Waldherr: I did extensive research for Unnatural Creatures, which was both pleasurable and immersive. I traveled to all the places mentioned in Frankenstein: Geneva, the Mer de Glace, Chêne, Belrive (now known as Belle Rive), Mont Blanc, and the grounds of the Villa Diodati, where Shelley began writing Frankenstein on a stormy night in June 1816 as a result of a literary competition to write a ghost story between herself, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidori. As far as surprising revelations, I’ve always been struck by the plot point in Frankenstein of Justine’s aunt in Chêne, who serves as the maid’s ineffectual alibi during her murder trial. Why does Justine mention Chêne, a small village south of Geneva, so specifically? When I learned Chêne was forced under French rule in 1792, I experienced a “Eureka!” moment that led me to notice the overlap between the events described in Frankenstein and the historical events of revolutionary France and Geneva.
5. For readers who might be intimidated by classic gothic literature, what would you say your modern retelling offers that makes these timeless stories accessible and relevant today?
Nancy Bilyeau: I think Gothic stories are super accessible today. Who doesn’t love a ghost story–or a secret to be discovered? A cry in the night across the moor? A brooding stranger who might not be good for you? These tropes are going strong. I think that the original Gothic fiction might have a perspective on women’s fate that we don’t feel that great about. The innocent young woman fascinated against her better judgment by a brooding, tormented, dark-eyed man in an isolated setting? That plot is hopelessly old-fashioned. But…wait a minute! Isn’t that the basis of Wuthering Heights, which has a new film adaptation that is so talked about that its trailer broke the Internet last week? I think you see what I mean. We love the Gothic then and now. We can’t help it!
Heather Webb: The classics are classics for a reason. They have either broken convention during that time that has created a lasting impact on every story that has come after it, and/or strikes a chord emotionally within each of us in a way that feels like a big truth that can't be denied. Retellings will always be popular because readers enjoy revisiting a world they’ve come to know and love either through the original texts or through film, TV, and stage adaptations. Through retellings, they can explore the story from a new angle that feels more relevant to modern times.
Paulette Kennedy: Dracula is one of those classics that has held up amazingly well! It reads like a modern novel. Stoker was quite a vanguard in his day, and broke literary conventions, giving us one of the foundational works of Gothic fiction. I think The Last Bride will offer fans of Dracula a fresh look at a beloved classic–one that honors the spirit of the original, while turning up the inherent sensuality of Stoker’s novel to a level that will appeal to spicy romance fans who enjoy sapphic love stories. I wanted to have fun with this retelling, and I did!
Kris Waldherr: As we careen into the age of AI, Frankenstein remains more relevant than ever. In addition to being a thumping good yarn, Frankenstein has so much to say about the human condition, as cliché as this sounds. In it, Mary Shelley delves into the darkest parts of the psyche to explore what it means to be human, what constitutes a soul, the responsibility of science to the world, and how our core experiences of parenting shapes our lives for better or worse. On a related note, I’m excited for del Toro’s upcoming Frankenstein film, which I believe uses bad parenting as one of its central theme. Plus Jacob Elordi looks wonderfully cast as the monster. Speaking of monsters, it’s intriguing he’s also playing Heathcliff in the adaptation of Wuthering Heights Nancy mentioned earlier. All this is proof of how eternal the Gothic remains!
To back the Once Upon A Gothic Kickstarter and get your own copies of these gorgeous books, you can head here.
If you love food and love Italy, and haven’t read IN THE GARDEN OF MONSTERS, THE CHEF’S SECRET or FEAST OF SORROW, click the links to learn where to buy your copy! And now you can pre-order my latest, THE HAPPINESS COLLECTOR!
Follow me here: Website | Instagram | Facebook | Threads | Bluesky | TikTok