Gothic Superheroes

If aesthetics were lunch tables in a high school cafeteria, I wouldn’t sit with the goths, but I’d probably borrow their eyeliner. I’m more of an Enid Sinclair to their Wednesday Addams. Still, when I looked at the settings and themes of my gritty superhero romance sequel, Deus Ex Umbra, I realized I’d pulled up a chair at the goth table after all.

My first brush with romance, though not capital-R Romance, was Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. The relationship between Jane and Rochester hooked me, but it was the ghostly atmosphere that stayed with me: Jane's dread of the red room and the past rightfully haunting Rochester.

That brooding hero with a dark secret became a blueprint for my own stories. In Saint of the Shadows, the Patron Saint hides more than one secret in his decaying estate. The sequel digs deeper into the past that won’t let him go. Where the first book nodded to Batman and Daredevil, Deus Ex Umbra draws as much from the gothic and darkly romantic tone of Interview with the Vampire as it does from masked vigilante comics.

As the characters struggle to reconcile past and present, a side character insists their answer lies “where science meets séance.” The story takes that literally as it blends science-fiction tech with old-world magic. My heroine, Marisol, studies physics but searches through graveyards and abandoned churches for what she’s lost. In a world of electric motorcycles and robotic suits, Deus Ex Umbra still nods to Edgar Allan Poe (specifically The Cask of Amontillado and The Masque of the Red Death). 

Even in its neon-pink lightning, the story dwells among shadowy ruins, where beauty decays and ghosts linger. Beneath its superhero sheen, Deus Ex Umbra carries the bones of a gothic tale—dark, haunted, and made for spooky season.

Count me as one of the goths!