The Architecture of a Gothic Soul

I did not choose this genre. It was carved into me.

I was six years old when the tanks rolled through the streets.

My childhood in Azerbaijan coincided with the collapse of an empire. The Soviet Union dissolved, and the government structure crumbled with it. I watched from the window. Steel tracks grinding on asphalt. Soldiers were putting down civil unrest and killing civilians for the crime of hunger. For the crime of demanding control over their own starving lives.

I was a child who saw too much. Felt too much. Imagined too much.

School was canceled for a month. I had no escape. My sister lived with our grandparents, leaving me effectively an only child in a house under siege. Confinement became my world. When I had read every book, colored every page, and played every game, the silence remained.

So I filled it.

I began to write.

My first poem was about a Grandfather clock. I no longer have the paper, but the memory is vivid. I wrote about the relentless marching of time. How the seconds tick away, indifferent to who you are. Indifferent to your pain.

A heavy philosophy for a six-year-old.

I wrote every day after that. It was a compulsion. A survival mechanism. At fourteen, Victor Hugo found me. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. My ink turned darker. Restless. I understood then that monsters could be saints, and saints could be monsters.

Then came the silence.

I stopped writing at nineteen. Something happened. A shadow I am not ready to name. Writing ceased to be a shield. It became a mirror I could not face. I needed to get out. Out of that house. Out of that country. I never needed to see those streets again.

I ran until I hit the ocean.

By twenty-three, I was in America. The land of opportunity. I took the opportunity. I climbed the corporate ladder. I built a family. I raised children. I walked dogs in safe neighborhoods where tanks do not roll down the street.

I closed myself off. I built layers of concrete and drywall over the soul of that six-year-old girl.

It did not work.

You cannot kill a thing born of ruin. You can only starve it for a while.

The Fallen Grace Chronicles is the breaking of that silence. It is my return to the roots. It is the cynical shadows of Constantine from the early 2000s. It is the theological rebellion of Lucifer (the show), the grid and darkness of American Gods. It is the grey spaces of political unrest and patriarchy I navigated as a child.

I write dark fantasy because I know darkness is not an aesthetic. It is a memory. I write gothic romance because I know love is not always soft. Sometimes it is a desperate thing, clinging to life amid a collapse.

I am done hiding behind the corporate mask. I am done being closed off.

This is my soul. Read it.

Layla