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 mo...

Nikki Elizabeth

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