I want to start by baldly stating that culture, especially “high art” culture, is often dark. Because cultures of most kinds are so influenced by the archaic necessity of the “catharsis” of “demons”, either momentary events or longer term psychological traumas, it is often dark. The natural world was a terrifying place for the naked monkey to live and Picasso said that the tribal creation of art was about exorcism. Surely this is no less true of the modern world with its alienating megalopoli. Gothic darkness is therefore ever-present in culture on

It is one thing to have lost boys in all things gothic and vampiric - and after all the entire genre might be regarded as the dark side of the prodigal son archetype in that it deals with exile, isolation and suffering - but what about the girls? In particular, what about the white girls? Where would the gothic be without its distraught maiden, alone and palely loitering: its Ophelia-Cordelia, its Miss Havisham, its Vampirella? Where indeed.  Many of the maidens of Gothicism have lost themselves in the “New World”. Indeed, the notion of a “postcolonial ha

Book of the Vampire Wisley: AAPPL,2008 Nigel Suckling Illustrations by Bruce Pennington Hard to imagine as it is, Nigel Suckling does not appear to be a nom de plume invented specifically for a book on vampires as one might expect: he has written and co-written books on a number of fantasy topics ranging widely from werewolves to mermaids. Indeed, Book of the Vampire is an example of what one might call the popular gothic in that it is an accessibly written, sometimes even arch, unannotated and glancingly referenced, text with broad non-specialist appeal. This is reinforced by the rather p