September 6, 2016 | Amadeus Chen
What particular propensities in Blake’s poetry and art inspire fictional murders of the most gruesome kind? Or inspire the author to deem Blake a suitable spokesman for serial killers’ psyche? We can first take a look at Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun, the painting Dolarhyde is so obsessed with that he has a full-scale tattoo of its image on his body.
May 30, 2016 | Vicki Madden
In 1798, Charles Brockden Brown published the first novel written by a professional American author: Wieland: or, The Transformation. Brown’s tale of a patriarch compelled to murder his family under the influence of religious voices was quintessentially gothic. More importantly, however, it was based on a true story. Inspired by the case of James Yates, a New York farmer who murdered his wife and four children after purportedly hearing the voice of God, Brown’s novel attained cult status among nineteenth-century readers, underscoring the American public’s appetite for murder narratives drawn from real life horrors.
