As I was listening thoroughly to the three artists Amanda Couch, Mindy Lee and Andrew Hladky circumvoluting over their personal corporeal experience in their group presentation suggestively untitled “On Entrails and Performances” delivered on the occasion of the “Body Horror/ Shapeshifters” conference held in Athens in November 2013, as I was integrating their critical perception of the digestion process through food and language and as I was pondering over the “spatter platter” (fig.1) quality of their puzzling works of art, a connexion with Stephen King’s Thinner emerged in

"In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the peruse, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images [...]."[1] Kaleidoscopic: such is the way I have aimed to envision King’s narratives, a multiplicity of viewpoints and interpretations offered to the readers to lead them in a transfixing danse macabre. In his essay, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” John Barth has pointed out thatthe conventional modes of literary represent

At the image of a labyrinth, Clive Barker’s Books of Blood (1984-85) unveil a set of intricate and disruptive short    stories weaved with the red threads of corporeal materiality and the monstrosisation of the body. A labyrinth is “a structure consisting of a number of intercommunicative passages arranged in bewildering complexity, through which it is difficult or impossible to find one’s way without guidance” (Simpson 564). Being one element of initiation in Greek mythology, the labyrinth is associated with its creator, Daedalus, with the monstrous Minotaur hiding at its centre

The Gothic Reading Group at University of Stirling recently convened to discuss over a glass of wine Marcel Theroux’s terrific novel Strange Bodies (2013). Thank you, Marcel, for having provided us with a fantastic reading experience, and for agreeing to respond to some of our questions and thoughts about the novel. There are many elements of gothic fiction in Strange Bodies, but there are also elements drawn from a number of different genres, such as thrillers, science-fiction, campus novels, conspiracy and spy fiction. In a sense, the form of the novel is a ‘monstrous’ a

Depth Charging Ice Plant Gothic is the forthcoming novel by Andrez Bergen, author of Tobacco-Stained Mountain Goat and Who is Killing the great Capes of Heropa? 'She's a disturbed, quiet girl, but Mina wants to do some good out there. It's just that the world gets in the way. This is Australia in the 1980s, a haven for goths and loners, where a coming-of-age story can only veer into a murder mystery.' This is a coming-of-age tale that fuses together urban fantasy, the paranormal, and fringe elements of sci-fi, dystopia, horror, the surreal, magical realism, and detective noir. "Andr

Playing children’s games in Stephen King’s “A Good Marriage.”   Setting the stage: Stephen King has been engaging himself in a game with his “Constant Reader” for over thirty-nine years.[1] The game implies an unveiling and an exploration of the characters’ and readers’ repressed childhood fears, a letting out of the uncanny[2] in identifiable loci where down-to-earth characters are staged. King’s Gothic heritage and his reworking of the Gothic genre have been highlighted for instance in Tony Magistrale’s Landscape of fear: Stephen King’s American Gothic (2005).

The programme for the 'Radcliffe at 250: Gothic and Romantic Imaginations' conference to be held at the University of Sheffield, 27-29 June 2014, is now available from the website.