We Live Here Now

We Live Here Now utilizes many of the tropes and conceits of the Gothic genre. Location is central to the book’s atmosphere, as the bleak and untamed Dartmoor landscape amplifies the novel’s narrative tension. The “desolate majesty of the frozen moors” in Pinborough’s novel recalls Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (25), where the environment mirrors the inner turmoil and unruly passions of the characters. Emily’s observation that “[t]he weather seems to change in an instant on these moors, the wild land’s moods swinging violently from one extreme to the other” draws attention to how the location’s exposure to dramatically shifting elements echoes her own unpredictable emotions (111). The remoteness of the Bennetts’ home, “alone on a hill” (5), also emphasizes the vulnerability and isolation of domestic life cut off from society.

Throughout the novel, Pinborough employs familiar Gothic imagery, including the haunted house. Larkin Lodge takes on an active, malevolent role by attuning itself to the psychology of its residents, much like Hill House in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House. Playing on the