I have to admit that for me one of the big draws of studying the Gothic novel is its scarcity. The fact that many of these novels were literally read to death and have completely disappeared is simply fascinating. I remember as a graduate student at The University of East Anglia, I would plan visits to the British Library for the unique opportunity of handling a rare novel that I was working on. Sitting in the Rare Book Room was something magnificent and after 20 or 30 minutes of waiting and preparing, I would be holding the novel in my hands…something that was almost sacred to me. Ther

“Elizabeth lifted her skirt, disregarding modesty, and delivered a swift kick to the creature’s head, which exploded in a cloud of brittle skin and bone.” This week I have been reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and well…it has me thinking. Admittedly, placing zombies in search of fresh meat into an Austen landscape has its advantages as well as disadvantages. On one hand, for those who don’t ‘prefer’ Austen it may enliven the narrative for this is a zombie apocalypse genre with a regency twist. Here we find polite society full of heroines fight

For several years now I have incorporated chapbooks or bluebooks into my courses on Gothic Fiction. These short tales of terror have been extraordinarily popular with my students, not just for their brevity and accessibility, but also for the garish illustrations which often accompany them, and quite frankly, their horror. It is not that students don’t enjoy reading full length Gothic novels…. Lewis’s The Monk is a perennial favourite as is Radcliffe’s The Italian….but Gothic chapbooks seem to capture their imaginations if not their attention. The reason for thi