Kuroshitsuji, or otherwise known as Black Butler, is an incredibly popular manga by Yana Toboso in 2006. It follows the life of Earl Ciel Phantomhive, a young boy who inherited his deceased family's fortune and became Queen Victoria’s faithful servant and a giant in the world of commerce. However, by his side is his loyal butler Sebastian, who is secretly a contracted demon to aid Ciel in uncovering the secrets of London's underbelly. The setting is very important to the gothic narrative as it includes sprawling manors, candlelit studies, fog-choked streets of London, and decaying churches. The setting evokes the traditional Gothic environment where secrets lurk behind heavy curtains and every shadow might conceal something monstrous. It balances the excess of the aristocracy with the decay of the urban space. 

Ciel Phantomhive is a textbook Gothic protagonist: aristocratic, traumatized, and with heavy emotions and obsessions. Like many Gothic characters, he’s emotionally repressed, morally ambiguous, and driven by a past he can’t escape. His pact with a demon (Sebastian) is a common Gothic trope where the hero sacrifices everything he has in pursuit of power or justice. In this way, Kuroshitsuji fully embraces the supernatural aspect of the Gothic. There are demons, grim reapers, and undead butlers, but in true Gothic fashion, the supernatural is never straightforwardly evil. Instead, it’s seductive, morally gray, and entangled with human emotion. They are representations of the human psyche. In this way, the story plays into the gothic uncanny. The demon butler Sebastian looks human, acts human, and plays the perfect butler, but he is very much not human. It has taken a common trope in British literature, the butler, and made it unfamiliar. Gothic works love these dualities: life and death, man and monster, child and adult, servant and master.