Gothic themes, tropes and narrative converge in the 2012 videogame Dear Esther. Set in perpetual twilight, on a deserted Hebridean island, this game is part of a growing sub-genre known as the ‘first-person walker’, which involves the player exploring a typically Gothic space – a setting as evocative as that of Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights. Through a subversion of gaming expectations and tropes, this chapter argues that Dear Esther's control system and lack of interactivity with the game’s landscape allows the player to take the role of a ghost, haunting the island, as she unis a narrative of loss and suicide. The chapter further argues that through the game’s construction, the player forces the narrator – an unnamed male whom the player hears as she walks across and even inside the island, delivering fragments of letters to the titular Esther – to endlessly repeat his suicide and the events that lead to it.

This chapter explores why so many fin-de-siècle Gothic novels conclude on equally complex, if different, forms of suicide, including Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Machen's The Great God Pan (1894) and Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The chapter argues that, as in Jekyll and Hyde, images of the self-destructive self should be seen within the context of models of social self-destruction found in theories of degeneration. The writings of Edwin Lankester and Max Nordau, in particular, suggest that society is prone to self-destruction when it becomes overly refined and collapses back on to itself. Images of the body thus need to be related to wider issues of the body politic. However, this chapter argues  that the fin-de- siècle Gothic does not simply replicate the terms used in theories of degeneration but rather scrutinises how images of wealth, cultural refinement and class-bound models of ‘civilisation’ lead to Gothic representations of self-destruction that strangely liberate the subject from the demands of the ostensibly degenerate body. The chapter outlines how the death of the body becomes, in suicide, an act of agency in which the self is able to transcend its corporeal limits and gain access to a higher spiritual realm.

Among the more counterintuitive tropes of the vampire genre is the propensity of vampires to attempt suicide (often successfully). This chapter focuses on three motivations for vampire suicide – vampire guilt, vampire martyrdom and vampire ennui. In relation to guilt, this chapter will discuss Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles series, James Malcolm Rymer’s novel Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood  and Park Chan-wook’s 2009 film Thirst. Vampire martyrdom will be discussed in relation to David Slade’s 2007 American horror movie 30 Days of Night, based on Steve Niles’s 2002 graphic novel, and Darla in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off, Angel . As for vampire ennui, the characters of Godric (Allan Hyde) in HBO's True Blood and Adam (Tom Hiddleston) in Jim Jarmusch's 2013 Only Lovers Left Alive will provide examples. After noting the motivations for vampire suicide in Gothic narrative, the emphasis of the chapter will be on the ways in which vampire suicidal tendencies constitute a half-hearted attempt to recuperate the vampire genre from charges of immorality through a strategy of inversion.

If the Romantic Gothic hero is typically defined by his or her marginalisation from society and its norms and is characterised by excess, individualism and transgression, the ultimate act of defiance is self-annihilation. Given its associations with a long-standing interest in what has been characterised as ‘the Romantic agony’, it is perhaps surprising that suicide is not treated as a topic distinct from death in the critical literature on the Gothic – all the more so with respect to its connections with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and its notoriety as a work causing suicidal contagion, with sufferers donning Werther’s blue coat and yellow waistcoat as if exchanging their bodies for his own. This chapter explores allusions to Werther within British Gothic writing about suicide, which are to be found particularly in writings by women. Their retellings of Werther’s story interrogate the relationship between infection and agency with respect to suicide. Works by Charlotte Dacre, Charlotte Smith, Sarah Farrell, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley are considered.

The Introduction will open by identifying, for the first time, the importance of suicide as a constant factor in Gothic textuality. Utilising Byron’s commentary on how Castlereagh’s death was understood in Gothic terms, it will demonstrate that the presence of self-destruction haunts the genre from Horace Walpole’s earliest intervention to its contemporary realisations. The Introduction will further argue that the Gothic provided a central corpus of images through which the complicated act of suicide could be understood, rationalised and contained – a tradition, as it were, of dissipating the troubling implications that accompany self-destruction. The emphasis here is less on the presence of the ghost, the vampire or the zombie and more on the singular and violent human action that in many cases prefaces the mobilisation of these occult and supernatural beings. The Introduction will then briefly summarise the chapters which follow, setting the tone for this unique and timely intervention into the medico-legal study of Gothic.

In recent years, J. Sheridan Le Fanu's ghost-story collection In a Glass Darkly (1871) has been interpreted through its Gothic, medical and theological contexts. Yet the focus of these disparate literary and cultural discourses at the moment of death and – more pointedly – in the enactment of self-annihilation has never been explored. The first three narratives in the collection, ‘Green Tea’, ‘The Familiar’ and ‘Mr Justice Harbottle’, depict troubled, indeed persecuted, individuals – a diffident clergyman, a retired naval officer, a notorious and corrupt hanging judge – whose lives end prematurely following a personal contemplation of past actions known to themselves, but not to their contemporaries. This chapter will consider the deteriorating mental states of the Reverend Jennings and Captain Barton, the respective protagonists of ‘Green Tea’ and ‘The Familiar’, and the retrospective account which charts the final days of the unfortunate Mr Justice Harbottle. All three stories amply illustrate the complex relationship between introspection and self-destruction in the persecutory tradition of Gothic fiction.

Suicide clearly held a particular fascination for Richard Marsh (1857–1914), one of the most prolific and popular fiction writers of the period, with representations of suicide and reflections on it featuring widely throughout his Gothic oeuvre. But this interest goes further than the astute incorporation of cultural anxieties, which Marsh often used as a key technique for heightening the disturbing effects of his work, to considerations of its social, philosophical and scientific import. This is evidenced not only through his fiction but also by a seemingly unpublished essay (in the University of Reading archives), from 1891–1910, simply entitled ‘Suicide’ (which includes the characteristically provocative suggestion that ‘there may be something to be said even in favour of suicide’). This chapter draws on examples from a range of Marsh's multitudinous Gothic (or Gothic-inflected) texts, including Mrs Musgrave (1895), A Master of Deception (1913) and  A Spoiler of Men (1905), which Johan Höglund identifies as containing arguably ‘the first instance of the zombie character in British fiction’.

This chapter explores the ways that Pauline Hopkins employs the act of suicide as a way to achieve justice in Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self, originally serialised in Colored American Magazine, 1902–1903. Although Hopkins’ novel is hard to categorise, many of its features – haunted houses, family secret, ghosts and incest – indicate its place within the Gothic tradition. On the very first page of the novel, the main character, Reuel Briggs, a Harvard medical student, asks ‘Is suicide wrong?’, setting up an ongoing obsession of the character and the novel. After many plot twists and revelations, the novel’s Gothic villain, Aubrey Livingston, commits murder. Another character intones ‘Justice will be done’, and shortly thereafter, Aubrey’s body is found floating in the Charles River. The narrator later explains that ‘“death by thine own hand”, [was] whispered in [Aubrey’s] ear while [he was] under hypnotic influence’; essentially he was forced to commit suicide. In Hopkins’ novel, suicide offers an unusual solution that both punishes the villain and relieves the victim of any sense that she has been the cause of the destruction of another life.