Open Graves, Open Minds: ‘The Company of Wolves’: Sociality, Animality, and Subjectivity in Literary and Cultural Narratives—Werewolves, Shapeshifters, and Feral Humans   Wolves have long been the archetypal enemy of human company, preying on the unguarded boundaries of civilisation, threatening the pastoral of ideal sociality and figuring as sexual predators. Yet, in their way, with their complex pack interactions, they have served as a model for society. Lately, this ancient enemy has been rehabilitated and reappraised, and rewilding projects have attempted to admit them more

(Some plot spoilers!) The launch of Sky’s Penny Dreadful in 2014 was greeted with an overwhelmingly positive response. Bringing together famous characters from canonical Gothic texts such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), along with referencing some penny dreadful tales, the writers conveyed original aspects of the narratives, and also added experimental twists by intrepidly weaving in new characters and amendments to the texts’ plots. The concoction of explicit scene

Reading Vampire Gothic Through Blood: Bloodlines By Aspasia Stephanou   Across the past two decades the classic Gothic figure of the Vampire has – despite their iconic solitary, elusive and secretive nature – hardly been out of the public eye since the release of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1992. Since the early 1990s, Vampires of all shapes and leather-clad sizes have hit our small and big screens with varying levels of cult-pop impact: Interview with A Vampire (1994); Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Series, 1997-2003); Blade Trilogy (1998-2004); Ultraviolet  (S

In my last post I suggested that the dominion of postmodernism had passed. The deconstructive impulse pursued so earnestly in the ‘new’ fiction of the 60s and 70s, and which re-emerged as parody in the 1990s, seems to have dwindled in the face of a resurgent narrative conservatism. However, this being a Gothic-centric forum, my attention remains focused on the particular status of that genre/mode in the contemporary literary climate. And, unsurprisingly, the Gothic once more resists easy generalisation. Yes, it can be claimed—and that claim supported with a multitude of texts—that G

So, initially I had an opening paragraph that offered a brief outline of Serial, the true-crime podcast phenomenon. But, after peak-pizza, then peak-beard, the internet has quickly reached peak-Serial, and since we now have backlash-backlash, an opening paragraph that described a podcast that has registered five-million downloads and a million “#Serial with cereal” tweets, seemed a little, well, redundant. All I know is this. One Sunday morning, I fell into the trust of investigator and confidant, Sarah Koenig, as she led me by the hand through the trials and tribulations of her invest

New Horror Novella Prisoner 489 by Joe R. Lansdale illustrated by Santiago Caruso Now Available from Dark RegionsPress The new horror novella and second book in the Black Labyrinth imprint Prisoner 489 by Joe R. Lansdale illustrated by Santiago Caruso is now available from Dark Regions Press on their website at: http://www.darkregions.com/books/prisoner-489-by-joe-r-lansdale Prisoner 489 marks a thrilling return to horror for bestselling author Joe Lansdale (Cold in July, Bubba Ho-Tep, Hap and Leonard) that Publishers Weekly calls "a tight, spooky tale about what happens when an execut

The Gothic Fairy Tale in Young Adult Literature: Essays on Stories from Grimm to Gaiman. Edited by Joseph Abbruscato and Tanya Jones. Jefferson: McFarland & Company Inc. Publishers, 2014. ISBN: 978-0-7864-7935-1 Reviewed by Donna Mitchell In the introduction to this collection of essays, Joseph Abbruscato emphasises the importance of the fairy tale through its status as the first literary genre that we encounter as children. He considers the original form and function of the classic fairy tale and stresses that the presence of horror in those tales gave them a Gothic element which

Since the death of David Foster Wallace in 2008, there has been much discussion of the status of experimentation in contemporary literature. Zadie Smith’s article, “Two Paths for the Novel”, was published in the same year and kindled a polarising debate over whether the experimental fiction is thriving or has been thoroughly beaten to death.[i] Some critics bemoan the loss of novelistic innovation, as if David Foster Wallace took the sacred art of experimental prose with him into oblivion. The cause is not helped by the recent trajectory of that totemic indicator of middlebrow literary c

Lynn Shepherd’s The Pierced Heart: A Novel is billed as a "homage to a literary classic, in a chilling tale of superstition, dangerous science, and shocking secrets." The literary classic in question is Dracula and Shepherd’s plot's trajectory mirrors Stoker's in someways: a clerk strikes out from London into the depths of Europe to conduct some business; he encounters mysterious and suspect behaviour from his host, the Baron Von Reisenberg; he eventually returns to London to file his report and return to his daily life. However, nothing is ever so simple. The aforementioned clerk

Googling popular culture depictions of a sociopath is an interesting experience. From the expected, Patrick Bateman, Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates, to the unexpected, Don Draper, Barney Stinson, Jess, from Benedict Cumberbatch to Tom Hiddleston, the cultural understanding, conception and popular application of the term sociopath is… somewhat mixed, at best. Peter Bradshaw, in reviewing Jake Gyllenhaal’s ravenous portrayal of Louis Bloom in Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, describes the character as “a grade-one sociopath wired to the moon.” As an audience then, what should we expect fr