A Note from the Author Rachel Cochran

I wrote The Gulf in the first few months of the pandemic, and it arose for a variety of reasons. I was teaching a class in Gothic literature at the time, a genre that’s all about the transgression of natural boundaries by unnatural forces.

As I wrote The Gulf, I became particularly interested in the power of Gothic literature to comment on domestic worlds: the ways a family or a community creates and keeps secrets; how abusive power dynamics become enacted, enforced, and internalized; and how these dynamics often remain invisible–even unbelievable–to those outside the families and communities that create them. The house itself becomes a unique symbol within this genre, with its containing walls and staring windows, which might look innocuous from the outside but which can hide any number of truths hidden within. There I was, locked inside my own house, isolated and anxious, ruminating on the ways houses can trap and conceal the violence they contain.

The Gulf tackles this question in the form of its protagonist, Louisa “Lou” Ward. Now an adult, Lou’s identity and worldview were shaped under conditions of oppressive secrecy during her childhood. She had to keep her home life completely separate and hidden from the world outside, so that the segregated school she attended wouldn’t learn that she and her brother were being raised by their Mexican-American aunt. But Lou was keeping secrets from her family, as well: such as her growing romantic obsession with her best friend, Joanna, and her passionate desire to belong to Joanna’s family, and particularly to her mother, the warm and nurturing Miss Kate.

But Lou’s prepossession with her own secrets keeps her from understanding the hidden realities of those around her. It isn’t until much later, in the wake of Miss Kate’s mysterious and violent death, that Lou is able to question her own perceptions of the people she thought she’d known so well. Was Joanna’s house really the paradise Lou had always imagined? Was Miss Kate’s death caused by the sins of the past–sins Lou’s desire had kept her from seeing?

The Gulf evokes a number of literary traditions–its writing was informed by the frenzied and obsessive consumption of texts like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Jesmyn Ward’s Sing Unburied Sing, Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, and the entire collected works of Sarah Waters and Tana French. At its heart, The Gulf is a literary thriller with elements of Southern Gothic laced through it. It’s perfect for the reader who craves something dark and plotty that’s also deeply character-driven, and someone who’s hungry to see a different kind of protagonist–queer, tough, Texan–take the wheel.