3 min readBengaluruUpdated: Jul 23, 2026 05:26 PM IST
Bengaluru is a city teeming with writers, in Kannada and English alike. Walk through the city’s bookstores, festivals, or cafes, and it’s hard not to meet an author. Shival Gupta is an exception, though—one of the few writing in gothic horror in English.
“I was always a big fan of gothic horror,” says Gupta. “I used to read a lot of it growing up, including Shirley Jackson and Edgar Allan Poe…psychological horror that uses the storytelling medium to convey grief, ambition, or a dark psychology within humanity.”
A software engineer working with a major payment portal, Gupta is the author of The Violins That Play at Kiff House, a gothic novel published in 2023. But this foray into gothic fiction is not his first brush with publishing. As a schoolboy, Gupta wrote ‘Truth Trust & Promise: Discovery of the Sword Case’, which was released at an event by then President A P J Abdul Kalam after the young author reached out to him over email.
Gupta, who is from Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, has lived in Bengaluru for 11 years. The city’s outskirts serve as the backdrop for ‘The Violins That Play at Kiff House’—a tale of a bureaucrat moving with her family into an eerie old home.
Gupta recalls that the novel took shape during a month‑long break before starting a new job. “I used to take long walks, which I still do,” he says. “There was this one classical violin piece by Beethoven I kept listening to. It always made me think of music from a haunted house on the top of a hill. That was a vivid picture… so I started writing about it, and slowly the characters and plot took shape.” Within three months, the book was complete.
On what drew him to the genre, he says, “I like to explore feelings that might not have a vocabulary for them, emotions where you have to write a novel to explain the feeling…my book is about the dichotomy of greatness, and madness, ambition, and passion.”
For aspiring writers, Gupta has a simple piece of advice: “Do not write for somebody else; write for yourself. When you write for other people, you are seeking validation. Art should not seek validation. Write for yourself and see if you can entertain yourself as a reader.”
