Bats as Librarians, Books as Bone: Gothic Fiction and the Library as Crypt

Part 6 of Writing and Reading Gothic Fiction, a 6-part series for The Gothic Cabinet

Last month I went to Portugal explicitly for one reason: to visit not one, but two bat-infested libraries.

Jump on a train from Lisbon for two hours north to the university city of Coimbra, where you’ll reach Biblioteca Joanina, which was built on top of a medieval prison between 1717 and 1728. Gorgeously baroque, with gilded bookcases floor to ceiling, lacquered wood in tortoiseshell and ebony, painted ceilings in which gods gesticulate among clouds. Portraits of Portuguese kings regard you from the upper galleries with expressions of mild suspicion, as though your presence here is provisional at best. It is one of the most beautiful rooms I have ever stood in. It is also, unmistakably, a place of the dead.

But I came for something I didn’t actually see, but which has been here for 300 years. Bats.

Aberdeen Bestiary: Bat. (12th Century Illuminated Medieval Manuscript)

They live among the books here, entering and exiting through a tiny hole (again, too small to see) in the gigantic door at the front of the building. The bats serve as pest control for the old manuscripts, hunting the moths and insects that would otherwise reduce five centuries of manuscripts to dust. Before they appear, the library staff cover the antique tables with leather sheets. In the morning, they remove them, clean up, and open the doors again to visitors. The bats retreat to their crevices and the books survive another day.

I guess you could say that the bats are employed by the dead. The manuscripts they unknowingly protect - the accumulated knowledge of the dead, the voices of people centuries gone - have no other custodians at night. Only the bats, those creatures we have long associated with darkness and death and the uncanny boundary between worlds, are willing to look after the books in this way. It’s one of the most gothic things I have ever encountered: centuries of textual preservation via nocturnal predators.

When we say that a book preserves a voice, we are speaking literally: the words on the page were formed by a mind that no longer exists. Every act of reading is an act of communion with the dead. I knew this abstractly, but it isn’t until I stood in a library like the one in Coimbra that I understood it viscerally. Yesterday I walked the Long Room at Trinity College Dublin, a vast, barrel-vaulted hall of dark oak and aged leather, and I felt the sensation of being watched. This was because marble busts of scholars and philosophers line the upper gallery, glowering down: Socrates, Swift, Aristotle, Cicero. At the far end of the library, an illuminated manuscript rests under glass - the Book of Kells, which is so vivid and so flat that I thought it was fake, but it turns out this is the actual book, 12 centuries later. As a crowd of tourists gathered around the manuscript, it struck me that what we were looking at is the preserved nervous system of a world entirely vanished. The books are not about the dead. The books are the dead.

This is quite literally the case in medieval manuscripts, which are made from bone, skin, blood, egg, and insects. It took the hides of 185 calves to produce the pages of the Book of Kells, and those pages were then ruled using animal thigh bones, with long feathers plucked from dead geese to make quills. And the ink? Crushed insects, eggs, and oak gall, which is made in reaction to wasp’s nests. All so biological. A library in medieval times was the aftermath of a bloodbath.

But also, there is the ways in which libraries appear so frequently at the threshold moments of gothic narratives, as the rooms where the truth is found, or lost, or deliberately obscured. In Wuthering Heights, Lockwood discovers Catherine Earnshaw’s secret in the margins of a prayer book: her diary, squeezed into the white space left by God. The text within the text; the living voice buried inside the official record. In Jane Eyre, it is in Rochester’s library, that masculine preserve of books and brandy and locked doors, that Jane first begins to understand the shape of her imprisonment. And it is not incidental that Bertha Mason inhabits the floor above. The madwoman and the library: knowledge withheld and knowledge contained, stacked one upon the other. Rebecca gives us a library as shrine, the room most thoroughly haunted by the first wife, where Maxim retreats and where the past refuses to be shelved.

The pattern, once you see it, is everywhere: the library as the room where the dead have most power. Where their voices carry. Where the living are most vulnerable to being claimed.

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Trinity College Library Dublin, May 2026

If the library is where the dead speak, then to be barred from the library is to be barred from speech itself - not merely from knowledge, but from the means by which knowledge survives. Did you know that, for most of the history of libraries, women weren’t allowed to enter? Not always by explicit prohibition, but by the thousand quiet mechanisms of exclusion. In A Room of One's Own, the speaker arrives at the library door only to be told by a kindly gentleman that '“ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.” Libraries had traditionally been male spaces, and when they first opened to women, there was an outcry: was it actually decent for women to climb stacks and stairs? What about all those obscene books they might read? Men were so flustered by the prospect of a mere woman entering a library that in 1907 they created women-only reading rooms. Books were not intended for women, and there is evidence of them having to get men to borrow books on their behalf. When the scientist Mary Somerville wanted to study in the 19th century, she had to request access to the Royal Society Library through her husband. There’s an actual letter in the Bodlein from Charles Darwin requesting a book for the Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaya in Sept 1870. Let’s not forget that ‘reading a book’ was a legitimate reason for being thrown into a lunatic asylum - but only if you were a woman.

Charles Darwin borrowing a book on behalf of Sofia Kovalevskaya (lending book MS/401/4)

Gothic fiction seems to be very aware of this no-books-for-women nonsense. The Yellow Wallpaper stages it as horror: a woman confined to a room, denied reading and writing, reduced to decoding the pattern on the walls because the archive is forbidden to her. Frankenstein’s creature, denied legitimate entry to human society, educates himself in secret by reading Plutarch, Milton, Goethe, and the result is a being of staggering eloquence and staggering loneliness, shaped entirely by the voices of dead men, with no living person willing to listen to him speak. The library gives the creature language, and takes from him the world.

This is gothic fiction’s great and persistent subject: the archive as site of both power and exclusion. Who gets to be preserved? Whose voice survives? The witch trials - that vast machinery of persecution that has run as a thread through this series - destroyed not only bodies but records. The accused women of North Berwick, of Pendle, of Salem, survive to us in documents produced by their persecutors: trial transcripts, confessions extracted under torture, the written testimony of men who had decided in advance what the women had done. The archive preserves them in the very act of their destruction. The library as crypt, again - but this time, the corpse has been arranged by someone else.

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Bats from Mafra library, April 2026

At Mafra, in Portugal - the second library I visited within a week - there are also bats. Mafra’s library occupies the upper floor of the vast palace built by João V in the early eighteenth century, its rococo shelves curving at either end in a shape that has been compared to a violin. João V was famously obsessive, famously excessive - he spent so much of Portugal’s Brazilian gold on this palace that the country was nearly bankrupted. And here too the bats come out at night to preserve the books. The library had them on display for anyone who wanted a bit of gothic flavour.

Morgan Library, New York, Feb 2024

The Morgan Library in New York offered a different kind of gothic entirely. J.P. Morgan (yes, the banker) had his private library built adjacent to his Manhattan house, and it is a room of extraordinary beauty: three tiers of shelving in red damask and bronze, a bright gold ceiling painted in Renaissance allegory, a Gutenberg Bible under glass, Blake’s illuminated manuscripts in a case near the window. There’s a different feeling to this library: this is less a crypt than a vault, less a place of preservation than of conquest. The dead are here, yes, but as trophies. It is gothic of a particular American register - the collector as conqueror, the library as the room that proves you existed and that you owned things.

Chetham’s Library, Manchester, March 2026

Against all of this, I found Chetham’s Library in Manchester almost shocking in its austerity. Founded in 1653, it is the oldest free public reference library in the English-speaking world - free, from the beginning, to any honest persons. It occupies a 15th-century medieval building that was once a college of priests, its dark wood and narrow windows and low ceilings so thoroughly gothic in register that it barely needs the word applied. There’s a mark on a table that was apparently made by the devil. And in 1845, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels sat together in an alcove and worked through the archive. The desk is still there and a small plaque marks the spot. They were using the accumulated voices of the dead to imagine the overthrow of everything those voices had built. The library as crypt, but with a different intention: not preservation but transformation. The dead summoned to justify the living. The books not as relics but as fuel.

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I am writing, at the moment, a novel set in a library in the Dordogne. In it, the monks who built the library centuries ago have been transformed by obsession, by transgression, and by a curse made by men who loved books more than they loved God. They eat the ink from the pages, which sounds like destruction, but is in fact the only thing keeping certain books alive: the ink they consume is the ink of a corruption that would, left to itself, dissolve the manuscripts entirely. They preserve by consuming. They are the dead who will not stop working.

I wrote them before I went to Joanina. I discovered, standing in that gilded room listening to the guide describe the evening routine of the pipistrelles, that the imagination sometimes arrives somewhere before the body does.

I began this series in the 18th century, with a genre that insisted on taking seriously what polite society preferred to ignore: the past pressing up through the floor of the present, the body refusing to stay buried, the house that remembers. Gothic fiction is a literature of unquiet. Suspicious of death, resistant to the happy ending, gothic fiction is committed to the idea that what we call the past is not past at all - that the dead have claims on us, and that those claims are worth re-examining.

The library is where that examination happens, where 5 centuries of manuscripts made of bone, eggs, and skin depend on bats. Where a woman’s voice survives only in the margin of someone else’s text. Where a revolutionary sits at a desk surrounded by the inheritance of a world he intends to dismantle, and where the dead are not safely dead but present, working, and reaching.

I have walked through five libraries across four countries and come away from each of them with the same feeling I get when I finish writing a gothic novel: that the boundary I had assumed was solid - between past and present, between the living and the dead, between what is preserved and what is lost - is permeable. Is, perhaps, a fiction itself.

The bats come out in the dark, eat the mice and insects that would ruin the manuscripts, and return to their crevices before morning, and the books survive.

The dead keep speaking.

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If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy The Nesting, my gothic horror novel about dead wives, Nordic folklore, and ghost elk.

Thank you for reading Part 6 of Writing and Reading Gothic Fiction, a 6-part series for The Gothic Cabinet. Check out the other five parts of this series for more insights on gothic fiction, and please share if you enjoyed. And if you’d like to support my work further, please pre-order my new gothic horror novel, The House of Cursed Daughters, publishing worldwide in October 2026.