(Not So) Quiet Places: Literary Soundscapes in Polish Children’s Gothic and Horror Fiction

This paper explores literary soundscapes, understood as socio-cultural-historical constructs, in selected works of contemporary Polish children’s Gothic and horror fiction: Marcin Szczygielski’s Czarny Młyn The Black Mill (2011), Grzegorz Gortat’s Ewelina i Czarny Ptak Ewelina and the Black Bird (2013), Małgorzata Strękowska-Zaremba’s Dom nie z tej ziemi The Otherworldly House (2017), and Dominik Łuszczyński’s Strzeż się stracha Beware the Scarecrow (2020). Drawing on literary sound studies, Gothic and horror criticism, and children’s literature studies, the aim of our analysis is to examine how these texts use silence, noises, voices, and everyday and bodily sounds to create haunted, spooky atmospheres, negotiate between broader cultural anxieties and child protagonists’ mindscapes, and adapt adult genre conventions for young readers. The books range from socially conscious eco-horror, through introspective domestic Gothic, to horror parody, each creating a distinct type of soundscape: from the tension between rural stillness and post-industrial noise, through aetonormative silencing and suppressed voices, to carnivalised pop-cultural acoustics. Although diverse in mood and style, all four texts rework global Gothic and horror tropes to varying degrees – some revisit dominant patterns, while others reshape them through local lenses – and defamiliarise adult storytelling conventions in a counter(-age-)textual mode. They serve as foils, and arguably counters, to the dominance of ‘central’, Anglo-American works in both Gothic and horror fiction and scholarship as well as in sound studies. Their approach sonically positions children as auscultators, engaging them in multisensory reading beyond the visual.