Agustina Bazterrica's 2017 horror novel, Tender Is the Flesh, conceptualises a world in which the nonhuman animal bodies that power the animal agriculture industry are replaced with humans, or 'heads'. This article explores how Bazterrica's depiction of a globalised, culturally sanctioned cannibalism both stems and departs from historical depictions of the cannibal in Gothic and horror fiction, ultimately interrogating a number of interlinked systems that structure contemporary anthropocentric thought. The novel's extensive attention to distinct linguistic regimes extends Carol Adams's ecofeminist critique of the mutually reinforcing relationship between language and the political dimensions of bodies that can be figured as 'meat', while its equally interrogative discussion of the numerous human social, cultural and ideological constructs that rely on specific claims around who and what might be considered edible provide an imaginative framework for enacting the anti-anthropocentric ideas of justice suggested by Val Plumwood's 'Ecological Animalism'. In doing so, Bazterrica's novel demonstrates the potential of Gothic and horror fictions that examine the edibility of the human to radically undermine human exceptionalism.
This article explores the relationship between Thing Theory and late capitalism through the gothic trope of the haunted object in the British horror-comedy film In Fabric (2019). It argues that Thing Theory's methodological approach to fiction has an inherent risk of obscuring the material networks of things, leaving social injustices of exploitative labour unexamined. Importantly, In Fabric's portrayal of the garment industry highlights the unregulated and precarious conditions that workers endure. Through object-oriented criticism, the article suggests that the Gothic mode can mediate the fraught relationship between commodity fetishism and Thing Theory. The trope of the haunted object demonstrates both the agential quality of matter and its dark, dangerous production. The spectral capacity of the object reveals the dead, hidden labour found within all things that is often ignored under consumer capitalism. It also explores how humans can be objectified under late capitalism, as characters develop an 'object-envy' as they are incessantly dehumanised by their labour and desire to become objects themselves.
This article explores the gothic dimensions of Roguelike video games, through procedural content generation (PCG) and its impact on spatiality and narrative. Focusing on The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth + (2017) as a case study, it argues that the ever-changing layouts produced by PCG evoke the uncanny, creating disorienting and unmapped spaces. The risk-reward exploration of the dangerous, unsettling environments of Roguelikes enhances feelings of dread and disorientation commonly shared by protagonists of Gothic texts such as Crimson Peak (2015), The Loney (2014), and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). By examining the intersection of game mechanics and gothic aesthetics, the article demonstrates how Roguelike games uniquely contribute to the Gothic mode, leveraging PCG to produce affective emotional states and a perpetually evolving narrative experience. It positions the Roguelike game as inherently Gothic, and PCG as a vital tool in the creation of gothic atmospheres in contemporary video games.
The two major works by Spain's best-known Romantic, Jos & eacute; de Espronceda (1808-1842), pull suicidality into the space that gothic pleasure creates for processing societally unacceptable desires. In El estudiante de Salamanca (1837), the ghostly, ghastly skeleton of the heroine, dead from losing the affection of her lover, leads him through a labyrinthine nocturnal city into a netherworld populated by the dead, and with her kiss, both marries him and marks his death. In El diablo mundo (1840-41), death personified, with a mortal sweetness in her gaze, offers the pacific repose of the tomb in her kiss, which repulses even as it seduces. By reading these narratives as suicide, within the framework of gothic pleasure, this article offers a more concrete understanding of death in Espronceda's work, diverges from established tropes of self-annihilation in the nineteenth century, and suggests that literary suicide can be fruitfully explored through the framework of gothic pleasure.
As a being whose mind is developing under the influence of political theories and the anecdotal evidence of the French De Lacey family, Victor Frankenstein's creature is a complex collection of ideas, aligned to no nation, empire, revolution, religion, or class. His original (human) body parts from various social strata (graves unknown, charnel houses, executed criminals), result in one who is not politically cohered. This diffusion raises him into a category of political refugee, as he journeys through monarchies, empires, kingdoms, and the new Republic of France. Scholars have established studies of the creature's appearance as representative of Asian immigrants or enslaved West Africans, indicating the social anxiety of rebellion toward their oppressors, even as a voice for animals who are part of his composition. This article argues that the creature's very variety of assemblage denies him political completeness. The creature resists placement except as Mary Shelley's compelling warning of the ethical ramifications of secret knowledge and violent outcomes, the abandonment of refugees and citizens, and the intolerance to vulnerable beings.
This article considers Marx's vampire metaphors through the tabletop game Vampire: the Masquerade (1991; 2018), and one of its video game adaptations, Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines (2004). Examining the vampire mythos from a Marxist perspective partly through Marx's own conception of these supernatural creatures, this article argues for an examination of role-playing vampirism as a symbol for alienation from urban capitalist society, as well as a potentially demystifying metaphor for the exploitative system itself through the parasitic relationship present between vampires and humanity. Weaving through vampiric metaphors relating to capitalism with player agency in solitary and collaborative play, this article engages with the representational potential of gothic gameplay. As part of the Gothic genre, these games provide useful instances of monstrous play, wherein role-playing as the monster gives way to a greater understanding of what is monstrous in society, one of the core purposes of Gothic media in general.
This article explores how Algernon Blackwood's spiritual and mystical beliefs complicate his relationship with the Gothic genre. Rather than adhering strictly to Gothic conventions, Blackwood blends supernatural elements with a sincere evocation of the numinous, creating a literature of possibilities rather than impossibilities. Writing at a time when distinctions between psychic phenomena and scientific materialism were fluid, he challenges conventional horror by framing the supernatural as an expression of heightened consciousness rather than external terror. This discussion also considers authorial intent. While Wimsatt and Beardsley's 'Intentional Fallacy' warns against privileging authorial intention in literary criticism, Blackwood's nonfiction and autobiographical writings offer valuable insight into his creative process. By analysing 'The Willows' (1907) alongside his travelogue 'Down the Danube in a Canadian Canoe' (1901) and essay 'The Psychology of Places' (1910), I argue that Blackwood's concept of 'dramatised emotions' transforms the supernatural into a means of communicating subjective reality. Using the pantheist notion of divine indwelling in nature, I propose the term 'weird immanence' to describe how Blackwood employs genre to articulate subjective truths more potently than mimetic realism. Unlike the traditional Gothic sublime, in which the natural world mirrors human drama, 'The Willows' represents an authentic emotional response to landscape, intensifying the eerie potency of Blackwood's fiction.
This article situates Blackwood's First World War stories within debates about the tensions between orthodox religious beliefs and the more heterodox beliefs championed at the time by spiritualists and others in publications such as The Occult Review. The article argues that Blackwood's interest in esoteric beliefs is placed under severe pressure during World War One as he perceives them as endorsing a type of primordial violence that manifests in the carnage of war. These tales reflect on the conflicting demands placed on the subject as they are pulled between the impulse to revel in violence and the ambition to assert a moral stance. Ultimately, a conventional form of Christian piety defeats other beliefs which celebrate violence, sexual desire, and freedoms from orthodox moral constraint. The article also explores how these issues relate to ideas of patriotism, gender, and models of qualified revenge.
Conceiving all the world's phenomena as 'natural', Blackwood constructed haunting entities using innovative unions of mind, spirit, force, and matter, locating them in mimetic storyworlds drawn from his own travels and experiences, including skiing and mountaineering. In 'The Glamour of the Snow', conflict between the modern world of Alpine ski tourism and the ancient powers of elemental winter produces a seductive, ghostly snow-being who lures the imaginatively-sensitive protagonist nearly to his death on a night-time ski trip in the high mountains of the Valais. This sport, which enabled skiers to experience the winter Alps in new ways, sprang from the same rapidly developing modernity putting mountain environments under pressure. Blackwood's story uses the agencies of snow and skis to explore the possibilities of new understandings between the human world and the natural world, as well as the dangers inherent in the encounter.
Blackwood's Canadian stories offer a version of Gothic wilderness-tourism terror, informed by an inherent ambivalence and repressed guilt about the British 'colonizer' entering traditional Indigenous territory. The encounter with Indigenous peoples and cultures, even as these cultures are recognized as more holistic and authentic than rational British subjects, is marked by a distinct discomfort. The British tourists, for all that they want to become one with nature, experience themselves encompassed by a hostile natural environment in which they are aware of themselves as intruders. Indigenous cultures in these stories are either threatening spectres ('The Valley of the Beasts'; 'The Haunted Island'; 'The Wendigo') or forlorn remnants ('Running Wolf'), in both instances highlighting the irrepressible guilt that stalks the white intruder who unconsciously courts an experience of self-dissolution as expiation. If the repressed content in these stories is the fact of colonization, entering the territory as a foreign element, an invader, represents a form of uncanny intrusion through which the disowned past returns. However, in Blackwood's stories, the characters seek out this memory of disownment. As a form of colonial expiation, Blackwood's Canadian gothics enact the process identified by Ren & eacute;e Bergland in The National Uncanny, whereby Indigenous ghosts (and monsters) are internalized within the colonizer's imagination as spectres of both guilt and desire.
Algernon Blackwood wrote in many broadly Gothic modes, from the traditional ghost story to pioneering tales of eco-horror. One largely unnoticed thread of thematic continuity running through much of his oeuvre is an abiding interest in the media technologies and networks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-an interest which is perhaps not so very surprising considering his lifelong engagement with such technologies, from his days as a reporter in the media ecology of 1890s New York City to his later reinvention as a media star in the early decades of the BBC. This article considers Blackwood's imaginative engagement with telephony, photography, wireless, and other media technologies and networks in his autobiographical writing as well as both supernatural and 'super-Natural' tales including 'You May Telephone from Here' and 'The Man whom the Trees Loved.'
Processes of becoming, of transformation or transmutation, are central to Algernon Blackwood's ghostly weird fiction. In the vast majority of his short stories, everyday people, places, and events are rendered potential entryways to other forms of life and consciousness - portals to 'elsewhere and otherwise', as he liked to put it. Across his fiction, he explores the possibilities and enmeshments of human and nonhuman psyches, and the rapturous dialectic of joy and terror that follows when the bounded human subject comes undone. Using stories such as 'A Descent Into Egypt', 'The Wings of Horus', and 'The Man Whom the Trees Loved' as case studies, this article argues that Blackwood achieves these enmeshments through a Gothic feeling-with - a 'dark empathy'. This dark empathy accommodates and gives shape to a dis-anthropomorphic aesthetics, one that is ultimately better suited to the entanglements between the physical and the nonphysical that characterise his fiction.
Algernon Blackwood's fascination with the concept of the personal 'cage' and the potential for liberation is central to both his worldview and literary legacy. This article explores these themes in his early, often-overlooked story, 'The Eccentricity of Simon Parnacute', examining its depiction of emotional repression and freedom, particularly within the context of early twentieth-century hegemonic masculinity. but also to examine the speculative possibilities of human experience and societal transformation, offering a nuanced critique of hegemonic masculinity in Edwardian England that underscores his own personal beliefs in the enduring importance of maintaining a connection to the natural world.
This article discusses Algernon Blackwood's engagement with sexuality and the erotic in stories published between 1908 and 1948. It argues that a focus on Blackwood's spiritual and mystical interests, along with his apparent celibacy, has meant that his representations of sexual desire have been overlooked or subsumed into wider considerations of the gothic and supernatural in his fiction. Through close readings of stories such as 'Ancient Sorceries' (1908), 'The Glamour of the Snow' (1912), and 'The Olive' (1922), it provides a fresh outlook on Blackwood's fear of what he termed 'sex-fever' and the dangers it presents for his male protagonists.
Over three decades, Justin D. Edwards investigated a diverse range of subjects within the Gothic, from tropes of racial passing in American Gothic to postcolonial Gothic literature to Canadian Gothic literature and beyond. What united Edwards’s array of interests was a consistent concern for justice, both in terms of socioeconomics and in terms of climate change. In keeping with this overall emphasis, and expanding it beyond literary studies, this article will explore the ‘The Deep’ by Clipping, a song which connects the historical dehumanization and consequent horror of the Atlantic Slave trade to contemporary environmental abuses and socioeconomic injustice. The song notably builds upon and revises HP Lovecraft’s Ancient Ones as the return of the monstrous repressed. Instead, the ‘ancient ones’ are the ones deemed excess, cast overboard like so much extra cargo by previous generations. Clipping’s Ancient Ones furthermore rise to enact a much-needed revolution in response to humanity’s environmental crimes. Those that rise from the deep are thus reminders of humanity’s failure to change and a mark of inevitable destruction and horror that awaits if we continue to refuse to change. The song thus merges the Gothic with Afrofuturism in ways difficult to contain within a single category, as the song is not Afropessimist but certainly induces panic in its methods even as it rewrites previous Gothic and weird texts in articulating its vision for an inevitable, post-human future.
