Before I sink my teeth into Ken Gelder’s latest book, New Vampire Cinema (BFI Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), first, some context. For numerous fascinating reasons Stephanie Myers Twilight Saga (2007-2008) was an overwhelming success. It announced the emergence of a demographic eager to consume vampire fiction.

Book Review: Rethinking George MacDonald: Contexts and Contemporaries. This collection of sixteen essays edited by Christopher MacLachlan, John Patrick Pazdziora and Ginger Stelle sets out to 'look directly at MacDonald the Victorian.' To achieve this the essays are collected into four thematic sections: ‘Belief and Scepticism’, ‘Social Reform and Gender’, ‘Ideals and Nightmares’, and ‘Scotland’. The broad scope of thematic concerns covered in the book allows the reader to gain a strong idea of MacDonald's role and his place beside his Victorian contemporaries.

Review: Lynn Shepherd's A Treacherous Likeness (Corsair, 2013) *Some Spoilers* Few can dispute the fascinating and mysterious nature of the lives of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley. Lynn Shepherd's new novel, A Treacherous Likeness is a wonderfully Gothic and thrilling attempt to understand the silences and gaps surrounding the Shelleys that history fails to provide for. Her third novel, following her style of historical detective fiction, delves even deeper into the realms of both biographical truth and literary license, as Shepherd re-imagines and exposes some of the secrets that h

Lovecraft, H.P.  The Classic Horror Stories.  Ed. Roger Luckhurst.  Oxford University Press.  9 May 2013.  Hardback / Kindle. (Since this review refers to the Kindle e-book edition, I apologise in advance for the lack of page references.) Out this May from Oxford University Press, The Classic Horror Stories of H.P. Lovecraft – edited by Roger Luckhurst of Birkbeck College, University of London – collects nine of the most significant entries in Lovecraft’s ‘Cthulhu Mythos.’  By equating ‘classic’ with ‘Cthulhu’ the book takes a firm but justifiable stance towards t

Luke Thurston, 2012. Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval (Abingdon: Routledge) Luke Thurston’s Literary Ghosts from the Victorians to Modernism: The Haunting Interval (2012) is a timely addition to the established literature on literary haunting. Throughout, the monograph posits that a host/guest dynamic is central to the function of the ghostly in a selection of short stories and novels from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The antagonistic dynamic that Thurston persuasively argues for is between narratives as hosts - often at first

Edwards, Justin and Rune Graulund. Grotesque (New Critical Idiom). Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2013. With preoccupations with the body—body horror, the abject, disability studies, medical themes, etc—prevalent within the contemporary Gothic and Gothic studies as a whole, it is little surprise that one of Routledge’s upcoming New Critical Idiom books is devoted to the grotesque. This volume by Justin Edwards and Rune Graulund highlights the importance and potential of locating the power of bodies (and the literature that features them) in the vehicle of the grotesque and its many ma

Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott, TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2013) Catherine Johnson, in her seminal Telefantasy (2005), argued that ‘the disruption of socio-cultural and generic verisimilitude implied in the representation of the fantastic […] offer[s] the opportunity to experiment with the formal possibilities of television as a medium’ (p. 147). Jowett and Abbott make a similar point in TV Horror, which aims to make us ‘rethink what we mean by horror within a televisual context’ (p. xiii). Their approach is one th

Antonio Lázaro-Reboll, Spanish Horror Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) Antonio Lázaro-Reboll’s Spanish Horror Film (2012) has been a long time coming. With only a few chapters and journal articles dedicated to the topic, this book comes to crystallise what is an important and growing academic field. Spanning the last five decades and focusing on important ‘horror overdrive’ periods in the history of Spanish cinema, this volume serves as both an introduction and a scholarly redefinition of the boundaries of the genre within the context of European and Hollywood horr

The Following - Episode 1 (2013) For all of its fakery, the Gothic mode is at times explicit about its reworking of certain tropes and character types. Strangely, an example that Fox's new drama The Following (2013) brings to mind is the titular homage of T.J. Horsley Curties' The Monk of Udolpho (1805-6) to Lewis and Radcliffe. If American crime drama was to take Horsley Curties' lead, the rather derivative The Following could be entitled 'The Lecter of CSI' or, perhaps, 'The Drunk Cop Archetype of Criminal Minds'. Why discuss it here? Its incarnation of the serial killer - Joe Carroll

Jennifer Brown, Cannibalism in Literature and Film (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) Although its title may sound impossibly ambitious, Cannibalism in Literature and Film is actually a very contained and focused volume. Complementing recent histories of the cannibal such as Daniel Diehl and Mark F. Donnelly’s Eat Thy Neighbour (2008) and Jimmy Lee Shreeve’s Cannibals (2009), Jennifer Brown’s book traces the emergence of this myth in the colonial novel and brings it into present times via Italian films and serial killer novels. Her main thesis is clear: the image of