The rhetoric of fear is a complex notion that incorporates the theory of the fantastic narrative as well as the techniques of subversion in literature. Its primary goal is to evoke distress and fear in the reader in order to make him question the truth behind the dominant ideology and to challenge the notion of absolutist perspectives of the reality. To achieve this, it employs the rhetorical figures of paradox, transmutation and metonymy, to name a few, along with the narrator‟s perspective on the events in order to introduce the uncanny and the marvellous which disrupt a supposedly ordinary world. The Gothic novel, which emerged in the 18th century England, employs these strategies in order to subvert either the ideas of the Enlightenment or Victorian strict rules of propriety. The theme it explores is the supposed duality of the human psyche. The three novels used for exploring the application of the Gothic version of the rhetoric of fear are Shelley‟s Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, Stevenson‟s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Stoker‟s Dracula. These narratives apply various devices offered in the inventory of the rhetoric of fear, but what they all have in common is the adoption of multiple perspectives, monsters as metaphors of subversive ideas and ambivalence of their structure allowing for variety of divergent interpretations.