Since the millennium, there has been a boom in Gothic stories in the Scandinavian countries. Many of them have received global attention, such as John Ajvide Lindqvist’s vampire novel Let the Right One in (2004), which has been adapted into two films, one Swedish-language film and one American version. This chapter addresses the historical and cultural context for this contemporary outburst of Gothic stories in the Scandinavian countries. It also presents some possible prerequisites for its international success. First, the chapter provides a survey of Gothic fiction in the Nordic countries, from its beginning in the nineteenth century up to the present. It demonstrates how Scandinavian Gothic is densely intertextual at the same time as it makes visible political and ecological anxieties central for the understanding of Scandinavian identities and ideologies. It also emphasises the use of Nordic settings and local folklore. Second, the mode expands on three distinct Gothic categories in Scandinavian narratives: the use of local popular believes in today’s crossover and Young Adult stories, the Gothic qualities of the Scandinavian landscape and its mythic creatures, and the rise of certain Gothic hybrid genres, such as Gothic crime.

Poetry in the nineteenth century is often described as ‘haunted’; that is, as being replete with spectres and poignantly aware of its literary predecessors. From their readings of early Gothic fiction, the poets of the period learned both to celebrate and to mourn the past, an approach that is evident across a wide range of texts. Close reading demonstrates not only how the aesthetics but also the underlying anxieties of the Gothic permeate Victorian poetry, transforming Gothic into an acutely contemporary mode. To read Victorian poetry as Gothic offers a point of entry into the darker anxieties of the age, represented in miniature with splinters of Gothic anxiety. This chapter focuses on the ways in which poets such as Thomas Hood, James Thomson, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Mary Coleridge appropriate Gothic aesthetics to reflect a nineteenth-century unease with social change, faith and death, looking backwards to the Gothic past and forwards to an uncertain future.