“He had long yellow teeth, a wide face, sunken eyes, pupils as dark as the twist of a man’s intestines.” – Steven Price, By Gaslight
STEVEN Price’s By Gaslight is a sprawling, atmospheric historical fiction novel that immerses readers in the thick, sooty fog of London in 1885. It delves deep into the hidden chambers of grief, longing, and identity. The book blends elements of Gothic horror, Victorian grittiness, and queer subtext (wait and hear me out with this aspect…), presenting itself as less of a traditional detective story and more of a slow-burning meditation on the nature of being haunted: by love, by legacy, and by the unknowable truths of others.
At the narrative’s center are two men: William Pinkerton, son of the famed American detective, and Adam Foole, a gentleman thief drawn into London in search of his lost love. They are united by the spectre of Edward Shade, a mythic criminal who once eluded William’s father and now slips through the gaslit shadows of William’s own obsessive pursuit. Their journeys unfold across continents and memories, from war-ravaged battlefields to South African mines, from opium dens to séance halls, mapping a world where secrets rot just beneath the surface.
The Gothic atmosphere is omnipresent and skillfully depicted. Price’s London is a decaying, suffocating
city; its air thickened by coal smoke, loss, and regret. The physical environment often mirrors psychological states: pathetic fallacy, a favourite Gothic element of mine. Streets and alleyways twist like jumbled thoughts; darkness and shadows conceal past wrongs, and sewers and loamy earth exhale the stench of things, perhaps people, meant to stay long buried. It’s a city of hauntings, but not so much in the supernatural sense: emotional and moral. This is a story where a place and time, past or present, clings to the characters like damp London fog on skin. (Am I making this sound like a Wilkie Collins’ novel?)
Traditional Gothic motifs abound: mistaken identities, lost loves, spectral figures, and decaying grandeur. Yet Price doesn’t deploy these simply for genre effect. Instead, they create a narrative space where emotional states—grief, obsession, betrayal—are rendered viscerally. The characters are all, in their own ways, haunted. William by his father’s unreachable legacy, Adam by the absence of a woman he once loved, and all by Shade, a figure less man than myth. That Shade may not even exist in the form they imagine only heightens the sense of chasing phantoms.
Set firmly in the Victorian era, the novel also explores the social tensions of the time, though often as backdrop rather than critique. Class divides are starkly illustrated: the genteel surface of London masks a grimy underworld of poverty and exploitation. Meanwhile, Victorian anxieties about science and superstition (How Mary Shelley!), identity and respectability, empire and its costs, all pulse beneath the surface.
Now, let’s take a look at the novel’s compelling queer undercurrents—nuanced, never explicit, but present in tone and structure if one “queers the text.” There is no overt gay/queer romance in the narrative, and I doubt the author intended any; still, the novel teems with queer potential. It resides in the intense emotional bonds between men—a homosocial backdrop, in the way identity slips and reshapes, and in the silences where desire and longing (may) exist. My intent is not to take anything away from platonic friendships and camaraderie between men; I am merely presenting the possibility for a different reader perspective.
The queer subtext aligns with Gothic tradition, where themes of forbidden desire, blurred identity, and unspoken tensions often drive the emotional core of the story. Consider the relationship between Count Dracula and Jonathan Harker in Stoker’s novel. In the repressive moral climate of Victorian society, where deviations from societal norms had to remain concealed, the Gothic genre served as a platform to explore what could not be explicitly stated. Price follows this tradition but stops short of fully illuminating these themes, again, because he presumably, consciously, never intended them.
Here are some great examples of coded subtext within the novel:
“Desire often lives in the silences between words, in the things we dare not say.”
“To be seen is to be vulnerable. To be unseen is to be free — and utterly alone.”
This is what makes “queering a text” so exciting, if you know what to look for. That said, I wasn’t consciously looking for it as I read this novel, but lines like the ones above sparked something in me that caused me to “queer between the lines.”
Structurally, the novel requires patience and diligence to get the Poe-esque style pay-off. Perhaps even an
appreciation for the non-traditional technique. Its length (I read the hardcover, which is nearly 740 pages!) and elliptical style may overwhelm some readers. Flashbacks within flashbacks, long descriptive passages, and multiple shifting perspectives abound. However, for those willing to surrender to its deliberate pace, the novel offers a richly layered experience.
I read one person describe Price’s writing here as “an extremely pretentious writing style,” which, of course, intrigued me. I appreciate a “so-called” pretentious writing style, particularly relating to 19th-century-centred fiction. It adds a sense of authenticity to the tone. Dan Simmons and Matthew Pearl are other modern authors who excel at capturing this historical fiction style. One reader’s “pretentious” is another’s “sophisticated flair.”
Steven Price’s By Gaslight is more than just a story about crime and pursuit; it’s a novel that explores the unseen aspects of human lives: the things and truths we hide and the identities and relationships we struggle to define. Price’s work integrates smoothly into the Gothic tradition while also making subtle and meaningful references to the queerness that has historically existed in society’s shadows, regardless of whether the author intended to infer this subtext or whether it was a happy accident that leaves room for reader inference. And if you leave me room, I will infer.
