Season of the Witch: The Birth of Goth
Calling all the Baby Bats and Elder Goths The real story of how post-punk's darkest children got their black hearts.
In Season of the Witch: The Birth of Goth, journalist and novelist Cathi Unsworth traces Goth subculture from its post-punk origins in Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, and The Cure through London's legendary Batcave club and the Sisters of Mercy's Leeds scene, out to the American gothic frontier of murder ballads, cowboys, and death cults. Thirteen chapters trace goth's evolution across five decades of music, fashion, film, and literature -- beginning with the Yorkshire Ripper murders and the political unrest, and closing with an epilogue that ties goth's fascination with ritual and blasphemy back to centuries of real and imagined Satanic ceremony.
Drawing on original interviews, archival research, and her own coming-of-age inside the scene during the Thatcher years, Unsworth connects goth's black-clad aesthetic to a much older English lineage: witch trials, folk horror, occult revival, and the true-crime headlines that fed a generation's fascination with the dark. An appendix, "Further Tales from the Crypt," extends the history past the book's main narrative, and an extensive notes section documents sources for readers who want to keep digging.
This is a cultural history built from primary sources and firsthand memory rather than secondhand nostalgia -- as much a work of social history and cultural reportage as it is a music biography. For readers of Simon Reynolds' post-punk histories, Jon Savage, and Mick Mercer's goth scholarship, and for anyone who ever painted their nails black and meant it, Season of the Witch gives goth culture the serious, sourced cultural history it has been missing.
Original art by Alex Murd. Afterword by Martin McCarrick.
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