~ GOT GOTHIC? CAIT O'SULLIVAN DOES! ~

I'm welcoming back, with open arms, one of my favorite peeps, Cait O'Sullivan! I know y'all are gonna love her as much as I do so why don't I just step back and let her take the stage. Cait?


Big thanks to darlin’ MJ for having me on her blog today!!

I love the Gothic era, dating from mid-to-late eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth. Classic Gothic novels are well known, Dracula, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hide, The Monk, anything by Edgar Allen Poe. Lesser well known novellas enthralled me, The Yellow Wallpaper by American author Charlotte Perkins Gillman has forever remained in my mind.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, what a fabulous read. What instantly captured my attention about Frankenstein was the reason it was written. Both she and her husband, Percy were in the Alps with Lord Byron and John Polidori and they had a bet to see who could write the best horror story. How totally fabulous. She then dreamed about a mad scientist and hey presto, Frankenstein was born. She safely won that bet. And it’s not as if female authors were the norm for the time either! Kudos to Mary Schiller oooh sorry, Mary Shelley. [:)]

Elements of Gothic writing include haunted houses, fainting heroines, dark secrets and various oddball goings on. It was also the first example of the supernatural creeping in. What a gloriously fun genre to write in…and so I did!! In order to keep the pace fast, both stories take place over two days thus producing two novellas under 50 pages.

First I wrote Sefton Manor, a country house that has somehow withstood the ravages of time, holds the key to Martha Kendall’s dysfunctional family. Asked by her grandmother to uncover the truth about her missing Aunt, Martha comes to Buckhurst Village. Despite unsettling occurrences upsetting her sensibilities, she starts asking questions.

Questions that lead her to Will Fellowes, a man whose family tended the grounds of Sefton Manor for centuries. Amidst whispers of pacts with the Devil, they pair up to wrestle the secret from the house.

Or will Sefton Manor consume them all?


Buy from Amazon or Musa Publishing



And I so very much enjoyed writing it, that I followed it up with Mugs & Monasteries. 

When orchid hunter, Evie Bourke stumbles across a near deserted monastery deep in the Burren, she has no idea she’s the first person alive to have seen it. All she knows is that life went a bit strange and was getting more bizarre by the minute.

Meeting alpaca farmer Aiden Dunne over a pint of Guinness, she is struck by his resemblance, yet to whom, she can’t quite remember. Aiden is searching for Munster Abbey for his family was connected to it for generations, culminating in the disappearance of his relative, the then Prior.

What happened all those years ago? Who or what is ‘the Wanderer’ and, more to the point,

what does he want?
Buy from Amazon or Musa Publishing



What’s next? I do have another short story three quarters finished but zombies have crept in here. Not sure what Mary Shelley would think of that. Could I tout it as a modern Gothic, I wonder?!

BIO ~

Cait O'Sullivan has a deep abiding love of words and magic, having had the good fortune to grow up in Ireland. The wanderlust in her blood sent her out to travel the world and now, residing in a leafy suburb of London, it is her thoughts and memories that journey far and wide in order to create her stories.

Learn more about her at
http://www.facebook.com/CaitOSullivanAuthor
https://www.facebook.com/personalcait
https://twitter.com/romanticait
http://caitosullivan.blogspot.co.uk/ 

Giveaway!~

a Rafflecopter giveaway