As a multi-genre author, I’ve found myself reflecting on what common thread draws my stories together. After a bit of reflection, the answer was obvious: gothic elements. There’s a particular type of gothic story that doesn’t rely on crumbling castles or candlelit corridors so much as the slow decay of modern certainties; rooms that turn tense, technologies that double as instruments of shame and vanity, and intimacies that become political. The Industrialized series opens on that exact terrain. From the mechanical corset that tightens like a ritualized noose to the dusty laboratories and the gala’s gilded rot, the book stages its gothic lens through industry, artifice, and control.

It’s the kind of story that hums with electricity and moral corrosion… and the kind you’ll want to read when the nights get long and the weather turns reflective. Truly, Industrialized is the perfect “darker half of the year” read.

Kristina: A Gothic Mind Unraveling

Every gothic story has its monster-maker — the mind too brilliant to rest, too wounded to stop. In Industrialized, it may seem like Titus is our monster-maker at first glance, but that mind really belongs to Kristina, the novel’s conflicted genius and self-conscious narrator. She doesn’t just inhabit the gothic tradition. Kristina rebuilds it from the inside, soldering intellect and mania together until they’re indistinguishable in the final stretches of Part One: Experiment.

Kristina’s unique tragedy is that she’s both creator and creation. If you haven’t yet read the story, I’m going to do my best to keep this vague while still diving into some of my favorite literary elements. The mechanical corset she’s forced to wear, for example, is a literal machine of restraint, but it’s also a perfect metaphor for her intellectual confinement — a structure that keeps her upright, disciplined, and docile while crushing her. Her mind, similarly, is brilliant and precise, but conditioned by years of indoctrination under Tarm Industries and the Mathesius Family’s corporate dogma. She’s a woman trained to think in systems that exploit her curiosity. She’s very much a victim of that greater, decaying system, but she also can’t resist her desire to create things just to see if she can.

Like a female Victor Frankenstein, Kristina’s genius has no moral off-switch. It’s both ambition and compulsion. The Industrialized series never lets you forget that her experiments are both intellectual and psychological — attempts to resurrect a sense of self after years of erasure. When she mixes new compounds, tests materials, or studies the grotesque technologies of her world, she’s simultaneously trying to escape it and proving she never can. Which leads me back to an earlier point I made: Titus, the series’ MMC, is not the monster-maker. He’s Kristina’s mirror, proof of what she could become and how close she comes to losing herself completely.

Kristina’s narration, meanwhile, reads like a postmodern echo of The Yellow Wallpaper, which was very much by design. (And you’ll spot some references to it in the moving ceiling scene and the final lament about wishing to see the “molding crawl.”) The more she observes, the less we readers trust what she sees. Kristina consistently records, rationalizes, dissociates — all in the same paragraph, at times. And like many gothic narrators of yore, Kristina’s unreliability isn’t a flaw in the writing. It’s the point. Her skewed perception is the evidence of her imprisonment. Her language fractures under the weight of systems designed to control her body and mind, and the reader must learn to read between the cracks as the series unfolds. (Well, for Part One and Part Two, at least. Poor Vinnie’s Valor leans pretty mill-of-the-run dystopian, and The Inconvenience of Time is firmly in the dystopian romance camp. Both, coincidentally, do not have Kristina as a narrator.)

Isolation defines her as a narrator — physical, psychological, ideological. She’s chained both literally (in the corset, in experiments, and in actual chains near the end of Part One) and symbolically (in loyalty to the very structures that hurt her and to her own curiosity). The people around her misread her intellect as volatility, her independence as danger. And what’s more gothic than a woman too clever for the role she’s given?

Kristina, at her core, is the gothic scientist reimagined for the modern age — not a man haunted by what he’s built, but a woman haunted by what she’s allowed to imagine and the horrors she’s enabled.

The Corset: Where Flesh Meets Industry

The mechanical corset is the novel’s first act of bodily horror — and its most enduring one. It “automatically gets smaller,” compressing ribs until breath and blood become luxuries. That image of the corset cutting deeper with each moment isn’t just physical torment — it’s a metaphor for systemic control, the industrialization of femininity, and the cultural obsession with perfection. (As one reader notes, it’s “societal pressure to change yourself in extreme ways to fit in to a mold [even if it could cost your life].”)

When the device is finally removed, the sensation isn’t relief so much as rebirth. The physical details — metal groaning, skin imprinted with mechanical seams — feel almost religious in their intensity. It’s a scene that very much recalls Mary Shelley’s fascination with creation and violation, but through the lens of machinery instead of lightning. And, as we mentioned in Kristina’s opening section, it’s a tool of control and a vehicle of isolation.

Architecture of Secrecy: Laboratories, Galas, and Gilded Rot

Traditional gothic stories love their manors and abbeys. Industrialized gives us labs and hangars instead. The Tarm Industries laboratory and the Nordstern Glänzend hangar aren’t sterile workspaces — they’re cathedrals of modern hubris, filled with hums, fumes, and a devotion to progress at any cost. And, to take things a step further, Columbina’s chapel brings in that decaying, haunting architecture gothic readers so crave. (To keep things in line with the industrial themes, I chose to base it off a few structures in the American Rust Belt and my hometown. The chapel exterior is based on Severance Music Center in Cleveland, Ohio, and its interior is based off St. Theodosius in CLE’s Tremont neighborhood. While I’m jabbering about my hometown, I’ll also add that we catch a glimpse of an “outdoor chandelier” in Part Two, which — you guessed it — is based off the GE Chandelier in Cleveland’s Playhouse Square.)

The Unveiling Gala, too, becomes a kind of gothic masquerade: chandeliers glitter over hypocrisy, and corporate responsibility is performed like liturgy. Everyone is masked by civility, while the real rituals — manipulation, experimentation, and inheritance — happen just out of sight. So much so, in fact, that Kristina is surprised when she learns that an acquaintance from the Gala didn’t survive the night. She doesn’t even discover who was actually behind his downfall until Part Two, as much of the story truly unfolds beyond her narration.

It’s no accident that much of the novel’s horror takes place in spaces designed to impress. In Industrialized, architecture itself is complicit, housing both elegance and cruelty in the same breath. Though not necessarily an intentional construction, it is a bit poetic that Kristina is fascinated by architecture, just as she’s enamored by the systems that strive to control her.

The Body: Scars, Prosthetics, and Technological Ghosts

If the setting is gothic in scale, the body is gothic in texture. Industrialized treats human bodies as records of social engineering — scars, prosthetics, and skin treatments all become ways of reading who has power and who doesn’t. And, ironically, I do mean for those to be applied in tandem. Let me elaborate.

Kristina’s torso, marked by years of mechanical corsetry, holds the story’s emotional center — her body both weaponized and reclaimed.Titus’s prosthetic leg and the recurring talk of experimental balms and physical “corrections” complicate what it means to be healed. Technology saves and harms in equal measure.

Kristina and Titus function as reflection of each other’s best and worst impulses. In terms of power, they very much fulfill a similar duality. They both hold an incredible degree of power, but they also both find that they’re pawns in a larger, more complicated system. They both hold power and very much do not maintain control. And when it comes to descriptions of their deformations, it’s not grotesque for spectacle’s sake — it’s for empathy. Readers feels every inch of what this society has done to its people, and how the scars become both evidence and defiance. (Though, while we’re on a note about the grotesqueness of their injuries… Read the last scene in The Inconvenience of Time if you want to see things get vivid. I googled some fascinating and horrifying things to bring that bad boy to life.)

Why Industrialized Belongs to Autumn and Winter Readers

There’s a certain comfort in discomfort, isn’t there? Especially when the air outside cools and the sun clocks out early. Industrialized feels perfect for that time of year when everything rusts, slows, and burns a little lower. (Almost like the aerugo solution that’s so ever-present in the series. Could that possibly be a metaphor for winter in an environment that doesn’t really get cold? Hmm. I digress.)

The novel’s sensory palette leans cold and metallic: rust, smoke, dim lamplight, the echo of the narrator’s madness. Its tension accumulates slowly rather than explodes. It’s not a story of jump scares, but one of slow unease — the kind you sit with over mulled wine under a rainy window. Believe me, you’ll want to stare outside and contemplate everything when you hit the horrifying conclusion to Part One. This is gothic for thinkers. For readers who like to linger in the gray space between beauty and horror, love and control. One reviewer called the series “cerebral,” and I love that description. It’s really ideal for fans of literary fiction.

What makes Industrialized especially perfect for lovers of literary fiction is its refusal to pick one lane. It’s speculative but poetic, political but deeply human. The story’s emotional current runs beneath the machinery, carried by voice and nuance rather than spectacle. These strands interlace so naturally (if I may say so) that readers who come for the atmosphere stay for the moral calculus. Every invention, every conversation, every scar is doing double duty… Character study and social commentary all at once.

A Gothic for the Modern Age

Kristina’s voice anchors the story in empathy. She’s a survivor navigating a system that rewards obedience and punishes curiosity. Her exchanges with Titus, the Family, and the institution itself trace the contours of power with an almost forensic eye. And the worst part? She’s too close to the situation to see how messy it is.

This is where Industrialized transcends genre: it’s not just gothic dressing over a dystopian plot. It’s a moral autopsy of control, of how bodies become battlegrounds and inventions become chains and social systems become decay. That’s what makes it so timely, so resonant, and so satisfying for readers who like their fiction layered.

Because this book doesn’t just entertain; it lingers. It takes what’s most frightening about modern life — surveillance, perfectionism, corporatized morality — and translates it into gothic language. It’s intelligent, tactile, and quietly devastating. Until it’s very loudly devastating in the final scenes of Part One and Part Two, respectively.

There’s a particular satisfaction in finishing the Industrialized series and realizing the haunted house isn’t a castle at all — it’s the system we live in. The ghosts are institutional rather than supernatural. The monster isn’t lurking in a crypt but running a company, selling “innovation.” In some instances, readers may find that they’re the monster, empathizing with the wrong players and growing frustrated at a victim who’s too close to the situation to see how bad it is. It’s a book that, if read closely, allows you to reflect on yourself and your role in the systems that shape you.

That’s why this story belongs to the darker months: it mirrors our own half-light — the space between what we build and what that builds in return.

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