Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin

Rating:
Summary: A fascinating subject that deserves better
Review: As a historian & a goth I so looked forward to this book. While it started out interesting, the closer it got to the 20th c. (my area of expertise) the more flaws I found in his research. I joked that he must have typed in "gothic" on yahoo & printed out everything that came up... then I looked in the footnotes. They are filled with website citations of peoples' homepages! No wonder the research was so bad! Because of space limitations I can only give one example: he lists "Carcass" & "Suburban Relapse" as Bauhaus songs, when they are, in fact, Siouxsie & the Banshees songs. I wonder what he got wrong in his research of previous centuries, about which I have less knowledge. It is so disjointed towards the end that, frankly, it reads like a 15-year-old's "Things I Like" list. What a disappointment! Someone else, please pick up the gauntlet & write an accurate history of goth influence on the centuries!

Rating:
Summary: Endless Terror...and LOVING it!
Review: Instantly engrossing from the time it's picked up, GOTHIC is the best comprehensive study of the real gothic culture from the invasion of Eurpoe to present day. This book should be extremely interesting to anyone who studies literature or European history.

Rating:
Summary: Very Good Overview
Review: Looking at some of the other reviews, which pretty much trash this book, I have to say that it really isn't all that bad. This is actually a pretty good introductory-level overview of an important and interesting genre (although Davenport-Hines emphasizes that gothic is more of a worldview than simply a genre). Speaking for myself, I didn't know much about gothic before picking this book up. I was familiar with the "gothic classics" (Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, Poe, Le Fanu, etc.) but didn't have much understanding of the real significance of the gothic mode, which Davenport Hines does an admirable job of explaining in this work. Honestly, I found this book fascinating, especially the discussions of painting (Goya) and the connections between the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Marquis de Sade, and the first gothic novelists. I finished reading the whole thing in two days. Davenport-Hines really gets your attention and holds it. He writes well, and the narrative (patterned according to the "history" or chronological development of gothic) flows nicely. Having said that, let me make a few negative points. Davenport-Hines' selection of texts seems pretty standard until he gets to the latter half of the twentieth century, and it's there that he seems to be hawking his personal favorites: namely, some novelist I never heard of ("Poppy Z-Brite") and the Cure. Here's where the author dates himself; he gives himself away as a child of the 80s, one of those sullen mall-rats who wore the thrift-store trenchcoats, had big hair and worshipped Robert Smith. Okay, I can accept the Cure and the other Euro-art bands (Joy Division, Bauhas) as representing gothic in late 20th century. But if you're going to talk about gothic in popular music, how could you forget to at least mention heavy metal bands like Black Sabbath, who predate the Euro-stuff by a decade? All the gothic themes are there in lyrics, cover art, and performer appearance. But these relatively minor oversights are forgivable. This is book is certainly worth reading, and if you're even the least bit interested in the literature, art, films, and music of terror, you should get the paperback edition (cheaper). It's intelligently written, hip to what's going on in academia, but also geared toward the layperson who wants a good starting point for further exploration.

Rating:
Summary: Gothed
Review: Subtitled "Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin," this book is not what one should buy for your weird teen goth nephew who wears a nose ring, black fingernail polish, listens to Marilyn Manson, and hangs out at the food court at the mall.

Davenport-Hines' book is strictly a historic work, tracing gothicism from the middle ages to today. While most of the book is interesting, the field is so big that the author can only bring surface examples to light without probing them too deeply. He has a section on the music of the Cure, and the literature of Poppy Z. Brite, but chose not, or just could not, interview either one of them.

The author's biggest mistake is the amount of pages spent on gothic architecture. The first half of the book is full of castle names, earls and dukes, and is of little interest to those who want to read about the gothic lifestyle.

The author does deconstruct the literature of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne rather well, in addition to a myriad of British authors whose names I am not familiar with, but might be interested in now. His coverage of gothic art is average. The book includes photographs of many pieces of art, but the author must resign himself to describing pieces he could not include in the pictures, leading to reader frustration.

I do slightly recommend this book, but do not be fooled by its dark cover. This covers four hundred years of gothic HISTORY, not four hundred years of your nephew hanging out at the mall and listening to Marilyn Manson (who is not covered here).

Rating:
Summary: more about tim burton?
Review: The book was great until it started getting to the last part of the 20th century. There he forgot a lot of current gothic works in the areas of comic books and film. I think Tim Burton was only mentioned ONCE in the whole book for his work on the first Batman movie. He should have further explored Tim Burton's work on Batman, as well as talked about Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, The Crow, etc. He also could have explored horror films with dark themes like Rosemary's Baby. And he forgot to talk about Batman comics, Sandman, and maybe even Spawn.

Rating:
Summary: THe athority on the history of Gothic
Review: This book is wonderfully extensive covering everything from Elizabeth Bathory to The Cure. It would prove useful to both modern Goths and literary scholars. This is a one of a kind resource that you will keep referring back to. It is the single most useful book on my book shelves.

Rating:
Summary: more about tim burton?
Review: This book was excellent, and would have had a fifth star had it not been for the last horrible chapter. Lacking the structure and finesse of the previous text (deadline panic?), the final chapter, which covers the most recent gothic trends, overlooks much obviously important contemporary gothic work. Perhaps the most overlooked item is Neil Gaiman's Sandman comic, a highly intelligent and powerful work of art that elevated the gothic genre higher than most any other piece in recent history. And focusing on the imitative, excremental writing of Poppy Brite, whose emotional infantilism employs gothic's worst tropes, undermines much of Davenport-Hines' previous text. Film-wise, much was passed over from Freaks up until David Lynch. Even Blade Runner, though sci-fi, emphasizes gothic conventions. And musically, where was the mention of the likes of the Damned, or the Misfits, or even Skinny Puppy, who upped the ante on Alice Cooper's theatrics, who himself was heavily influenced by the non-theatrical reality of Iggy Pop's nihilism? Artwise, the Surrealists--and the Dadaists--questioned the value of life and society in ways that perpetuated gothic ideas. What about Artaud, and the Grand Guignol theater? Mentioning Damien Hirst and the Chapman brothers reeks of name-dropping and filler more than it does the gothic aesthetic. Although these artists are fascinating in their own macabre fashion, they hardly embody the very gothic qualities the author himself spent the rest of the book building (excepting perhaps the Brothers' recreation of Goya's drawing). Do we really need to know about Hirst's restaurant? The last chapter should have been the strongest considering its temporal proximity to the present, but instead was its weakest. A book like this can't be expected to detail everything, but the closer the timeline came to contemporary culture, the bigger the gaps. The rest of it, however, was so strong and fascinating in its own right that the sins of the end can be forgiven. Avoid the last chapter and remain satisfied.

Rating:
Summary: Hines investigates why we love to be afraid of the dark!
Review: Using all his powers of perception Richard Davenport-Hines draws the black curtains back and reveals why humans have this odd fascination with anything gothic. Though insightful and often thorough to a painful degree, Hines seems to hit all the highlights in what is a most difficult topic to cover completely. Far from objective Hines gives his opinon on the greater and lesser talents of the Macabre, from Lord Byron to Poppy Z. Brite, Hines speaks about his subjects with passion or with ambivalence, depending on his preferance. Though the start is slow, tracing the history of English Gardens the book gradually builds up steam until the end, in which with great love he speaks of English modern artists. Throughout Hines is insightful and his style of writing mixed with the sordidness of the subject matter leads to a good informative book with plenty of appeal for those interested in the Gothic tradition.