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If all this sounds familiar, you’re right! I’ve talked about this before, but there’s a crucial difference now. I’m giving you a chance to try it for yourself! Introducing Gothic Meter, a program that takes a text and not only tells you whether it falls within the wider Gothic sphere (Gothic, horror, dark fantasy, or science fiction), but also how and why.

This is an invaluable tool for an author, for reasons that will become evident in this post.

In a nutshell, Gothic Meter is a result of my academic-level familiarity with and knowledge of the Gothic. Everything I know about the Gothic, from the role of the supernatural to ambiguity, and from the sublime to the role of time, has found its use in this program.

Let’s see how; and let’s see why you should care.

Gothic Meter: or, how to Check Your Narrative Ingredients

The program is written in PHP – with JavaScript responsible for the visuals. However, you probably don’t care much about that, but about how it can help you better understand your text.

Gothic Meter accepts a .txt file, and after a short analysis (depending on the length of the text, it shouldn’t take more than a few seconds), it returns the following data:

• Its assessment (in percentage) of how likely the text in question is Gothic.
• How various elements have contributed in assessing this work as Gothic. In more detail, it detects the following patterns:
  • Fear
  • Sublime
  • Reality
  • Time
  • Ontology
  • Settings
  • Topical
• How the above progress throughout the narrative.
• How narrative pace in conjunction with fear vary throughout the narrative.
• Other variables that have contributed in the assessment, such as elements of proximity, ambiguity, memory, and the grotesque.

The program page contains definitions and other helpful notes on all these items.

In terms of examples, for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the program returned 76%; for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 77%. For… Pride and Prejudice (one of my control/comparison texts), it returned 8%. That’s very satisfactory. Here’s a short video highlighting the program:

Click to display the embedded YouTube video

But the question relevant to you is, how can it help you improve your craft?

How This Program Can Help You Detect Hidden Patterns in Your Novel

Obviously, if you write Gothic or horror (and perhaps science fiction or dark fantasy), it’s a no-brainer. But even if you’re a writer of other genres, I’d argue the category progression feature alone can be fundamental in helping you see patterns you should be aware of.

• Is your narrative preoccupied with settings to an excessive degree?
• Have you written a thriller where affect (in the form of, well, thrills) starts strongly but then goes down in the second half?
• Are there large deviations between the first third of the novel and the rest?

You can discover these and many other patterns, in a matter of seconds!

So, Where Can You Find Gothic Meter?

You can try Gothic Meter following this link. For a full list of my available programs, see the relevant page on the main site.