Book Review of 21st-Century British Gothic: The Monstrous, Spectral, and Uncanny in Contemporary Fiction by Emily Horton, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, 9781350286566. $103.50
Emily Horton’s 21st-Century British Gothic: The Monstrous, Spectral, and Uncanny in Contemporary Fiction features Gothic literature centring on British anxieties concerning terrorism, immigration, and economic recessions, resulting in far-right political decisions like Brexit, which Horton parallels to America’s military response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks as well as immigration policies on the U.S.-Mexico border during the presidency of Donald Trump. This crossover between Britain and America, not in the literary choices but in the neoliberal politics, highlights the transnationalism in the book, with an emphasis on populations affected in the Global South, displaced peoples and minority groups who are trying to survive in the midst of climate change, human migration, disease, and war.
Holton carefully selects Gothic novels, and a few short story collections, that function as “a challenge to received conservative and market-driven thinking, countering the dominant networks of neocolonial and neoliberal power in favour of more decolonial, feminist, queer, and planetary perspectives” (3). The three central modalities where Holton explores Gothic challenges to the social order involve “the monstrous, the spectral, and the uncanny” (15). The resulting analysis is unapologetically political and serves as a courageous, eye-opening contribution to the growing Gothic canon. Perhaps what is most unique to 21st-Century British Gothic is the way Holton flips the literary expectations of Gothic narratives. Instead of Gothic novels creating worlds that are dark and distorted, it’s our world that is dark and distorted, and Gothic literature that brings those distortions into focus, brings clarity through monstrosity and spectrality, throwing into stark relief injustices of the 21st century along with a challenge to become more active in opposing them.
The book is organized into nine chapters: Post 9/11 Gothic, Decolonial Gothic, Gothic Inheritance, Digital Gothic, Gothic Homelessness, The Gothic City, Brexit Gothic, Pandemic Gothic, and Wet Gothic. For those involved in Haunted Shores, the chapter on Wet Gothic will likely be of particular interest as it highlights Gothic engagements with “coastlines, wetlands, rivers, and oceans” (197). Drawing on Emily Alder’s work on the nautical Gothic, Horton critiques the use of oceans and wetlands for profit, the result of far-right agendas. While the ocean features prominently in a number of texts in 21st-Century British Gothic, Wet Gothic focuses exclusively on British women’s writing with an ecofeminist critical approach, specifically Julia Arnfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea (2022), Daisy Johnson’s Fen (2016), and Zoe Gilbert’s Folk (2018). These texts explore our interconnectedness with water via “monstrous feminine encounters with watery spaces” (212). As a reader of Gilbert’s Folk, set on the island of “Neverness,” a fictionalized version of the Isle of Man, the stories often veer into folk horror, with disturbing and explicit examples of “patriarchal brutality” and “clan mentality” (213). However, Horton illustrates how the monstrous feminine confronts, subverts, and occasionally overthrows male authority on the island.
The use of Gothicised folklore is also explored in Horton’s chapter on Brexit Gothic, highlighting Sarah Moss’ outstanding novel Ghost Wall (2018). As with texts included in Wet Gothic, Moss’ novel exposes “a Gothic return to local superstition and folklore” (161). However, in this case, it’s for the purposes of “nationalist isolationism” in rural communities hoping to reclaim an ‘authentic’ English past (161). For those who have read Ghost Wall, Horton’s analysis will only deepen the unsettling effect of the novel, where English nativism and Iron Age history collide to form a violent, jaw-dropping front for bigotry and domestic abuse that transforms into human sacrifice.
Gothic and horror genres similarly overlap in the chapter on Pandemic Gothic, which studies M.R. Carey’s The Girl with all the Gifts (2014) and The Boy on the Bridge (2017) as well as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and Klara and the Sun (2021). Here, the postmodern monsters include the clone, the robot, and the zombie. While zombies typically represent fears of infection and contagion, mindless consumption, death, and the collapse of civilization or society, Horton provides a more nuanced view of these Gothic monsters as victims of humanity’s lust for life: “… these novels reinterpret twenty-first century medicine as a space of Gothic extermination, wherein anything is permitted given the premise of individual advancement” (180). Horton demonstrates how these texts prioritize of the human body’s health over all else, justifying staggering callousness as clones are grown for organs and zombified/infected children are experimented on in order to save human lives. Throughout the chapter, Horton reveals increasingly disturbing “Gothic-Horror tropes of child exploitation and bodily dismemberment” (186), effectively linking Ishiguro’s Klara to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), with Klara exploited much like Frankenstein’s creature and at the mercy of a mad scientist. For me, Klara and the Sun is one of the most potent examples of Horton applying affect theory to Gothic texts, where affective reading deploys “creative tactics that disturb and unsettle readers’ feelings—generating unease in the hope of provoking critique and/or action” (11). Although Klara is a robot, in Ishiguro’s novel she comes across as highly empathic, nearly angelic, surrounded by inhuman/e monsters.
Horton assumes an educated audience for 21st-Century British Gothic. By this, I mean Horton consistentlyrecognizes the work of other Gothic scholars, such as Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, Masha Wester, Fred Botting, Xavier Aldana Reyes, and many others. This text will be a useful resource for anyone studying contemporary Gothic fiction. Likewise, Horton presumes an audience that has read the novels, making the analysis much more engaging for those who have done so. While I was intrigued by all the chosen novels and story collections (and have since added titles to my growing reading list), I found myself, understandably, more interested in the chapters where I was familiar with the material, such as those mentioned previously in this review, as well as Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching (2009) and Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger (2009), which are investigated in a haunting chapter on Gothic Inheritance. Additionally, the Gothic Inheritance chapter will be of interest to those involved in neo-Victorian studies as Horton claims Oyeyemi’s and Waters’ texts as neo-Victorian due to their use of Victorian Gothic tropes as well as their subjects/themes which touch on current British anxieties about inheritance, specifically how it “threaten[s] white European lineages, and more largely to an endangered imperial project increasingly offset by resistance and rebellion” (71).
For those who invest in 21st-Century British Gothic, and the selected texts it thoughtfully examines, Horton’s insights will expand previous definitions and applications of the Gothic and challenge readers to be aware, speak up, and act on the injustices revealed through a Gothic lens.
Shannon Scott is a Professor of English and Film in the Twin Cities. She has contributed essays to collections published by Manchester UP, Routledge, Palgrave, and Bloomsbury. In addition, Shannon has published short fiction in several magazines and anthologies, including Nightmare Magazine and Crone Girls Press. She has created two lecture series on the horror genre for Audible. You can find more information at: https://sf-scott.com/