Mrs. Peregrines Home For Peculiar Children

Gothic Literature is known to incorporate many gothic elements into it’s stories. Authors such as Ransom Riggs, Horacio Quiroga, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edward Poe have done a great job by proving this using elements like monsters, grotesqueness, and fascination with the past. In both the novel Mrs. Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children by Riggs and the short story “Feather Pillow” by Quiroga two main characters died suddenly by a monster. In Mrs. Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children Jacob finds his Grandpa Abe dead by a “tentacle-mouth horror in the woods” (Riggs 39). This tragic death leads Jacob into a downward spiral, causing him to travel to a strange island to find out more about Grandpa Abe, these strange monsters and why they killed

For example, in both Mrs. Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children by Riggs and “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” by Hawthorne the main characters go through a lot just to relive the past. Even though both the stories deal with different motivations, they both have fascination with the past. Jacob in Mrs. Peregrines Home for Peculiar Children goes across the world to find out about everything that his grandfather did that lead up to his death to “finally be able to but [his] mystery to rest” (Riggs 64). All of this is motivated by the last words his grandfather said to him before he died, even though “[he] wanted to act like [he] didn't care about the last words but [he] did” (Riggs 45). In the short story “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” three characters who have lived an awful and sinful life are approached by a doctor and is asked to drink this water which will make them young again. Once they drink this water they become obsessed and beg “Quick! Give us more of this wondrous water! They cried. We are younger but still not young enough” (Hawthorne 2). They become so consumed by being young again that they “decided at that moment to travel to Florida and drink morning, noon and night from the fountain of youth” (Hawthorne