Gothic tourism of the 1840s

5 questions with Rebecca Janicker

Siobhan Hanlin on William Dunbar

Conspiracy and Masculinity in Ira Levin

From comic book to Dark Knight

A few months ago, Penguin promoted their 'My Penguin' concept (selling a number of books with blank covers, for readers to decorate as they liked) by asking some figures in the music business to design their own covers. You can see Ryan Adams's cover of Dracula here. He went with Castle Dracula as the iconic image of the novel, which I thought was an interesting choice. I've got a theory that the cover art on editions of Dracula reflects our changing interest in the novel's focus, in perhaps a more explicit sense than we see with other novels, and in that context, Transylvanian castles seem t

Gothic reading group

As part of the continuing Gothic community at Stirling, we hold a reading group several times a semester. Usually, the text in question is a contemporary Gothic (or arguably Gothic!) novel or collection of short stories; in previous weeks, we've discussed Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, James Robertson's The Testament of Gideon Mack, Chuck Palahniuk's Haunted and Rachel Klein's The Moth Diaries, among others. The most recent reading group looked at Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box, which was published earlier this year. It's difficult to talk about this new author without bringing up his father:

The third film version of Richard Matheson’s 1954 novella I Am Legend is due for release in December and I, for one, am looking forward to it. I remain intrigued by how vampirism and the trope of disease are re-worked in different periods, and after 63 years, Francis Lawrence’s vision will undoubtedly provide further insight into how American culture manages its home-grown ‘others’.   Interestingly, the first two film adaptations are ideologically opposed. Sidney Salkow’s The Last Man on Earth (1964), starring Vincent Price, is closest to depicting the mora