C. M. Rosens

OUT NOW: Dark Gothic Fantasy for Adults

A Beauty and the Beast tale with body horror, rot plague, monster spice, and aromantic, bi, and sapphic rep.

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Breaking Down the Tale & Book Recommendations

This is my first post of 2024, and the final BATB post! Let’s look at how this story can be Gothic, Horror, Dark Romance… and then some examples of this in books in these genres.

Catch up on the whole series of fairy tale posts here.

The elements of the tale lend themselves especially to Gothic tropes, so let’s look at these more closely, and build a new Gothic version from them like a series of writing prompts!

• The family suffer a reversal of fortune. Loss of fortune in Gothic novels is usually a very bad sign for the heroine, as it puts her in danger of power imbalance by various villainous figures, but it can also outwardly symbolise the decay of the family’s morals and respectability.

For Belle, it’s the former, and for the Beast, it’s the latter, but in your version, there’s no reason why it can’t be the other way around – or that Belle is the monstrous one/from a “monstrous” background. Playing around with this can set the tone if you’re going for horror, and especially if your horror has a Gothic flavour.

The loss of fortune for Belle is an indignity that she can rise above, and in doing so, she foreshadows her ability to transform the Beast’s own decay and monstrosity and restore him to civilised society. Some examples of the rich family come down in the world, or specifically, the impoverished heroine hoping for a rags-to-riches narrative arc, but not necessarily BATB tales, include:

• The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• Dragonwyck by Anya Seton
• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (Gothic vibes but not horror)
• The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
• The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht.

• The fatal request. Belle asks her father for a rose, and that leads him to steal from the Beast’s garden and make the fateful deal to become the Beast’s prisoner in exchange, as penalty for his theft. There are then two ways this can go: one, the Beast threatens to kill him (and his family) unless his daughter Belle becomes his prisoner, or two, Belle swaps herself for her father to save him, which is the version that affords her more agency.

This trope might also be thought of as the protagonist’s mistake, which is the one that leads them into the clutches of the villain of the tale, or the antihero love interest, depending on the story. It could also be thought of as the be careful what you wish for trope.

In The Death of Jane Lawrence by Caitlin Starling, Jane’s marriage of convenience comes with a caveat: not to stay at Lindridge Hall, her husband’s crumbling manor. And of course, she does, and in doing so is swept up in some dark secrets and creepy Gothic, magical goings-on.

Practical, unassuming Jane Shoringfield has done the calculations, and decided that the most secure path forward is this: a husband, in a marriage of convenience, who will allow her to remain independent and occupied with meaningful work. Her first choice, the dashing but reclusive doctor Augustine Lawrence, agrees to her proposal with only one condition: that she must never visit Lindridge Hall, his crumbling family manor outside of town. Yet on their wedding night, an accident strands her at his door in a pitch-black rainstorm, and she finds him changed. Gone is the bold, courageous surgeon, and in his place is a terrified, paranoid man—one who cannot tell reality from nightmare, and fears Jane is an apparition, come to haunt him.

By morning, Augustine is himself again, but Jane knows something is deeply wrong at Lindridge Hall, and with the man she has so hastily bound her safety to. Set in a dark-mirror version of post-war England, Starling crafts a new kind of gothic horror from the bones of the beloved canon. This Crimson Peak-inspired story assembles, then upends, every expectation set in place by Shirley Jackson and Rebecca, and will leave readers shaken, desperate to begin again as soon as they are finished.

In The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux, Christine Daae prays for the Angel of Music, which her late father promised he would send her after his death. In fact, what she gets is Erik – and she is easily persuaded that Erik is her angel, because of her late father’s promise. Ask for a rose, get the thorns as well.

• The cursed hero/antihero/antivillain/villain/antagonist in mysterious, Gothic surroundings. This could be the Byronic Hero, the Fallen Hero, the Antihero, the Villain Protagonist… the list goes on. In Dark Romance, this is the serial killer who will kill everyone you know except you, or the villain who wants you for his own twisted reasons. Either way, this is the monster in the castle, and there must be one for this to be a Beauty and the Beast story. Usually but not necessarily, this figure is connected to a creepy house, a castle, the catacombs, somewhere dark and mysterious. Or, if we’re in Southern Gothic territory, maybe the swamps. Australian Gothic would have other settings – the desert, the mangrove swamps, a small isolated town… wherever it is, there’s some monstrous bastard lurking there, and they’re after you. For Reasons.

In Arden Powell’s m/m Gothic Horror novella The Bayou, it’s dark fae and the Louisiana swamps that form the BATB background, and Eugene’s twisted relationship with the enigmatic fugitive calling himself Johnny Walker is the central relationship. Eugene is the cursed one (haunted by a past he cannot remember), but Johnny himself has/had ties to the area he cannot escape, either.

The protagonist has to meet a figure embodying monstrosity in some form. They may be physically monstrous (but this can go along with an ableist plot or tropes, especially if this character is human and scarred/disabled/has physical differences, so be careful of that) or they are an actual monster, or the monstrosity is internal – they might be a serial killer, e.g., as in Dark Romance.

This comes up a lot in various forms: Pamela by Samuel Richardson, for example (a Sentimental novel rather than a Gothic one), Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte certainly, where its other parallels are discussed here, and Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux.

As I mentioned before in the previous post on horror films, the love triangle where the Beast does not ‘transform’ and therefore loses out to the hero can function as a split between Beast and Prince, with the hero as a foil for the Beast. The protagonist (usually a heroine) must work out their feelings for the Beast or at least come to terms with the fact that the Beast’s monstrosity cannot be ‘saved’ or ‘redeemed’ through the protagonist’s love and actions. Here, the transformation aspect is more the pivoting away from the monstrous and its allure or influence, towards the person the protagonist’s love can affect/effect in a positive way.

Not all Dark Romances are Beauty and the Beast adjacent, but quite a few are. Here’s a GoodReads list of Dark Romance, so you can have a look!

Some that have been recc’d to me as BATB or BATB-adjacent are books by:

• A. J. Merlin (Pleasure and Prey series),
• H. D. Carlton (Cat and Mouse duology),
• Harley Laroux (Souls Trilogy).

Of course, meeting the beastly man and taming him is a staple trope in Romantic Suspense and pulp Gothic Romance, too – Nine Coaches Waiting by Mary Stewart is an obvious one, and so are Moura and The Devil Beyond Moura by Virginia Coffman (Anne Wicklow series, Books 1 and 4).

Salt & Broom by Sharon Lynn Fisher is a dark SFF retelling of Jane Eyre (respelled as Aire, although other characters retain their original names), which I think counts here as Jane Eyre has so many BATB parallels already.

Similarly, The Wife in the Attic by Rose Lerner is another retelling of Jane Eyre in the sapphic vein, with plenty of atmospheric Gothic flavour.

Jane Slayre by Sherri Browning Erwin is in the same vein as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, except Jane is battling vampires in this mash-up, and Bertha is a bloodthirsty werewolf in the attic. She’s still head-over-heels for Rochester, though.

Again, I’m going to add I Feed Her To The Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea, because this has a ballet dancer becoming a Beast-like figure (it’s explicitly a villain origin story), by giving herself to the eldritch blood river in the Paris catacombs and kissing the poisonous monster boy who has already made several deals with the river himself. This is a very loose and adjacent BATB story, but it’s got so many of the elements and then does very clever and fun things with them, and I think it’s worth a look.

• A transformation occurs due to the relationship between Beast and protagonist. The usual nature of this transformation is the returning of the Beast’s humanity, or the transformation of the Beast into a worthy partner for the protagonist. This can be done through breaking a literal curse, or by a shift in the Beast’s perspective and attitudes. However, the transformation process may be subverted so that it is the protagonist who changes and becomes more ‘Bestial’, or the transformation/curse breaking part is actually the freeing of the protagonist from the Beast’s influence to choose the Prince figure at the end of the story. The Prince in this case is the foil for the Beast.

Clive Barker gets a mention for these sorts of storylines. He writes about this… a lot. The Hellbound Heart is an obvious one (and I covered its film adaptation, Hellraiser, in my previous post). There are also BATB themes of transformation in Cabal and Imajica, and plenty more in the short stories collected in the volumes of The Books of Blood.

So does Angela Carter (in very different ways), and there are many stories where female agency is explored through the monstrous feminine, or in the female protagonist’s transformation and gaining of agency.

In fact, I think a lot of Carter’s writing explores themes found in Beauty and the Beast, not just in her collected short stories but in some of her novels as well, like Heroes and Villains (cw for rape).

After the apocalypse the world is neatly divided.

Rational civilization rests with the Professors in their steel and concrete villages; marauding tribes of Barbarians roam the surrounding jungles; mutilated Out People inhabit the burnt scars of cities.

But Marianne, a Professor’s daughter, is carried away into the jungle–a grotesque vegetable paradise–where she will become the captive bride of Jewel, the proud and beautiful Barbarian. There she will witness the savage rituals of the snake worshippers, indulge her voluptuous, virginal fantasies, taste the forbidden fruit of chaos…

Erotic, exotic, and bizarre, HEROES AND VILLAINS is a post-apocalyptic romance, a gripping adventure story, a colourful embroidery of religion and magic and, not least, a dispassionate vision of life beyond our brave nuclear world.

Again, the plot doesn’t need to be romantic. Familial relationships with these elements include The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean, where transformations in attitude and perspective occur for love, in this case, of a mother for her son. Devon’s son is born with his ‘curse’ (not really an actual curse, but an anomalous ability, and a need to eat human minds rather than books).

Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book’s content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries.

Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon—like all other book eater women—is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories.

But real life doesn’t always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger—not for books, but for human minds.

I think you can see a bit of the subverted transformation and reclamation of the curse, changing it into something else via love and community, in The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez.

Vampire stories often have BATB or BATB-adjacent plots (looking at you, Anne Rice), but if I’m going to mention one of them, I would like it to be this one, as I think this is beautifully done with slice-of-life segments. This one is not intended to be a BATB tale, necessarily, but I think you can see some themes there.

The winner of two Lambda Literary Awards (fiction and science fiction) The Gilda Stories is a very lesbian American odyssey. Escaping from slavery in the 1850s Gilda’s longing for kinship and community grows over two hundred years. Her induction into a family of benevolent vampyres takes her on an adventurous and dangerous journey full of loud laughter and subtle terror.

This is about a lot of things, particularly being Black and queer in the USA, and also about using your abilities to help rather than take, learning how not to be a monster, and finding your place in the world in a network of those who love you. This isn’t about lifting the “vampiric curse” but embracing and reimagining life and its joys with it, which I think qualifies it for mentioning here as an example of how you might interpret and subvert different elements and themes.

So while not strictly a BATB plot – I think it kind of fits here and shows how you can subvert and play with different elements of this story, which I will look at more below, just for fun.

Writing Horror: Prompts

There are so many ways to use these themes and build on them for a horror story.

Some things to think about:

1. Is the family situation (typically the loss of the mother in some way, the loss of fortune/being from a poor background, the thrusting of the protagonist into the Beast’s path due to actions of family members) going to be part of the horror, the main site of horror, or the set-up before the horror begins? How are those themes going to play out, or will this be part of the background rather than the main plot?
2. Is the power imbalance between the “Belle” character and the “Beast” character going to be part of the horror and what do you want to do with it?
3. What is the nature of the central relationship – is the “Belle” character going to transform into the “Beast” character, does the Beast represent a part of Belle, or is this a story about Belle’s escape/emancipation from the Beast in some way?
4. The Beast’s curse is usually to do with a lack of love in the Beast’s heart for others, and so love is the way back to community and a life worth living. Conversely, without it, there is only isolation, monstrosity, and tragedy. Which way do you want this to go, and how does it unfold?
5. What’s the site of horror for you? Is this a body horror story, a psychological horror story, or something else? The site of horror might even be in the protagonist’s home situation (the parental figure who throws them to the Beast in the first place, the trauma of poverty, or something else) – so that leaves the Beast as a twisted, monstrous kind of refuge, but will that go wrong?
6. How will the plot threads and themes be resolved – with the Beast’s death/resurrection/transformation (metaphorical or not), with the protagonist’s transformation/death (metaphorical or not), with a happy ending, or something else?

My own Beauty and the Beast reimagining, Yelen and Yelena (coming soon, revising stages), is a dark SFF version and not a horror version, but there are some horror elements in it. Yelen’s curse has been set forever, and he’s been a Beast for nearly 200 years at this point. I play with the themes in the tale, but very differently to the way I do in The Crows, which is my contemporary Gothic eldritch horror novel.

In The Crows, the protagonist’s abusive boyfriend, gaslighting friends, and divorced parents are the big reason why she ends up obsessing over a ruined house and throwing herself into its restoration.

There are multiple imbalances of power in the novel, as most things Carrie encounters are supernatural while she is not, and she does get injured accidentally and on purpose by them. She is also the powerful one, in that she owns the sentient house (Fairwood, known as The Crows locally) and it relies on her for its upkeep.

Where Ricky is concerned, he could break her neck and rip out her kidneys in seconds flat, but he is incredibly lonely, under-socialised, touch-starved and sex-averse, so all she has to do is make a joke about sex or romantic intentions and suddenly she’s in control of the situation. He’s more the Rapunzel character despite his shaved head (he has tendrils to make up for this), but he doesn’t even know that he’s trapped until Carrie shows up.

She’s also the one teaching him to think a bit more like a person, while he influences her into thinking more like him. There are several transformations in the novel, and the main one follows through with the theme of camouflage and people-pleasing as a self-defence mechanism, and the fact that Carrie tries to blend in wherever she is, and allows things to consume her.

I left the resolution a little open-ended because there are more books and stories to come, but I think it’s resolved well enough.

Excited to see what else can be done with Beauty and the Beast in horror, as I’m not really done with it and I love reading other people’s takes on this tale, and finding its themes in unexpected places when you squint and look sideways!

Next Time:

Snow White came out ahead in the poll! So I’ll be looking at retellings (your recs), poisoned fruit (and ribbons and combs), wicked queens, and Gothic/horror adaptations.

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