Mary

Cassidy’s novel features many of the tropes of Gothic literature, a genre of horror that rose in popularity primarily in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly in British literature. One key hallmark of Gothic literature is a focus on tension and suspense; texts amplify the emotional and psychological situations that their characters experience to question the limitations of humanity and sanity. Most Gothic literature includes a foreboding atmosphere of gloom and despair that foreshadows catastrophe; scenes of extreme emotion; abandoned or decrepit mansions that hide literal, familial, and historical secrets; geographically or meteorologically precarious environments; and women in life-threatening or psychological danger, typically from men who have power over them and the women who are complicit in enabling that power. Additionally, the past and present are often intertwined in Gothic literature. Early Gothic classics include Horal Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In the 20th- and 21st-century American versions of the genre, the historical elements unearthed in Gothicism tend to be based on historical injustices: For instance, novels such as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) tackle the horrors of slavery and the Jim Crow South, while works such as Sylvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020) consider the aftermath of colonial occupation.

Mary uses many of the techniques of Gothic literature. Mary is a relatively powerless outsider who must make sense of an insular and strange town, which has a violent and obscured history both publicly (as the site of a serial killer’s activities) and privately (as the site of her intense childhood bullying). The supernatural elements of Arroyo are centered on a decrepit mansion with abandoned floors that is literally a repository of the past, as it contains the medical files of the many women murdered there. Mary’s psychological state is in question: She hallucinates, is unsure enough about her connection to reality to wonder whether she murdered people without realizing it, and has a history of being institutionalized. The novel intertwines timelines, jumping between the past and present to show how one influences events in the other. Finally, the novel reveals that its supernatural elements are in fact part of its reality rather than Mary’s psyche, cementing its identification as Gothic horror.