The Gothic is a mode of fiction defined by a pervasive sense of fear, foreboding, and paranoia. Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, about a man struggling to preserve his family line in the face of illness and cryptic prophecy, is often cited as the genre’s progenitor. Many of the tropes and aesthetics present in Walpole’s novel—such as ghosts, decaying buildings, and entombed characters—have gone on to become touchstones of the genre. Works by 19th-century writers such as Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker continued to develop the Gothic mode, providing a foundation for later writers like Shirley Jackson, Daphne Du Maurier, and Carmen Maria Machado to use the Gothic to reflect the shifting concerns of 20th- and 21st-century literature.

Gallant engages many aspects of the Gothic tradition. The eponymous house is a thoroughly Gothic structure in both the architectural and literary senses, with its foyer that “arches like bones of some great beast” (49), its secret passages, and its walls hung with the portraits of the Priors who have died on its grounds. Gallant is quite literally haunted by the ghouls of Grace, Arthur, and—by the novel’s end—Matthew, but it is also haunted by the specter of a past Olivia is trying to understand.