Though the novel is often read through a Victorian Protestant lens—with Van Helsing as a mouthpiece for Enlightenment rationality and Catholic superstition—its treatment of Catholic sacramentality is far more ambivalent.

Bowen’s inheritance of Le Fanu is most visible in her refusal to name. The emotional heart of both stories lies not in what is said but in what is withheld—the kiss never described again, the walk into light never completed.

This essay undertakes a speculative but serious reassessment of H.P. Lovecraft’s ideological architecture—not to exonerate his well-documented racism, but to explore the possibility that his fiction, consciously or otherwise, performs a ritual of self-subversion.

Lovecraft’s particular brand of horror reflects the unconscious structure of imperial modernity: a psychic architecture haunted by its breakdown.

“Only empty places can create echoes of lasting clarity,” --Mark Z. Danielewski