Edited by Monika Elbert and Bridget M. Marshall

Interdisciplinary has become something of an academic buzz word recently but like many good ideas it’s often easier to talk about than practise. To redress this Ashgate have brought out this collection of essays purporting to re-orientate the Gothic as a global aesthetic rather than as something that draws specifically from certain nationalist or political settings.

The aim is ambitious and from the outset the collection makes clear that easy or dogmatic answers are not going to be reached. The opening introduction which sets out the current state of Gothic criticism in exhaustively researched detail makes the valid, and well overdue point that all too often Gothic criticism falls into ‘the either/or – gender or race’ categories. Other binaries that the collection seeks to blur are ‘the oppositional tendencies,’ that of “us versus them” that , according to the collection’s editors, colonial Gothic criticism often falls into.

By and large this new collection succeeds in breaking free of, or at the very least questioning, these received constructs. The essays are grouped into four different sub-sets that focus on areas that should be familiar to Gothic scholars – Old and New World Gothic, Gothic Catholicism, Anglo-American Gothic and Gothic beyond the novel, or ‘Social Anxieties’ as the collection somewhat ambiguously terms it.

The sections are all very strong with particular stand outs being Diane Long Hoeveler’s essay on the demonization of the Catholic other and Sian Roberts’ excellent essay at the beginning of the collection on transnational criticism. The Roberts essay is exemplary of the collection as a whole as it questions the scholarship that perpetuates stark differences between British and American Gothic despite this not being borne out by the realities of Gothic literature. Well written and thoroughly researched the essay is compelling reading but serves better to problematize issues and debates rather than give specific answers. To some readers this could well be the collections biggest failing as an interdisciplinary approach necessitates ambiguity and complication rather than resolution.  More than once reaching the end of an essay simply provides more questions than answers.

Perhaps, however, the only other real criticism can be found in the collection’s subtitle of ‘literary and social exchanges in the long Nineteenth Century.’ Whilst the analysis on the cultural and social exchanges that form the basis for a transnational aesthetic seems compelling what is not given as much prominence is the role of capital. Cultural exchange is arguably dependent upon and precipitated by economic exchange. Books followed slave and trade ships across the Atlantic and this economic part of the transnational analysis seems less developed than others.

In short, the collection is an excellent resource for cultural, social and literary critics with an interest in Gothic scholarship. Rather than adhere to a particular school of criticism that is rooted in a limited framework the collection seeks to question received wisdom and complicate and problematize how we view the Gothic. The introduction speaks of the Gothic as a literature of freedom, or at the least of liberating possibilities. Criticism may not agree but with collections such as this aiming to blur boundaries and raise ambiguities the liberating possibility contained in this collection makes for complex but informative reading.

This blog post, my second one, will focus on a specific physical ‘difference’ or marked body, namely the body disabled by amputation. Examining Lon Chaney’s characterisation of an amputee in The Unknown (1927), I will explore what amputation might mean when marked as different or other, and how amputation might take on different affective significations. The post is based on research I’m currently doing for a book chapter, so any ideas or reading tips would be very much appreciated.

Lon Chaney and Joan Crawford in The Unknown

‘Amputatio, the Latin noun from the verb amputare, to cut off or cut away, derived from amb, about and putare, to prune or to lop, was little used in Roman texts and never, it is believed, to indicate a surgical amputation; however, the verb amputare was employed with reference to cutting off the hands of criminals. Its deriviative in the English language, amputation, was not assigned to limb excision by surgeons much before the 17th century.’ (Kirkup 1)

Lon Chaney, ‘the man of a thousand faces’, is famous for his various and elaborate gothic embodiments on screen; well-known examples include his renditions of the hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) and the phantom of the opera (1925). He specifically had an attachment to roles which required both make up and performance to embody physical difference. In two films – very different from each other – he played the roles of amputee. In the film The Penalty from 1920, Chaney’s character has both his legs amputated as a child – by mistake, by a misinformed doctor – and as a result of the social hardship he experiences grows up to be a criminal mastermind. Referred to by his rivals as ‘that cripple from hell’, Chaney’s character is desperate to take revenge on the doctor who performed the operation. The childhood amputation thus becomes the main plot of the entire film, with Chaney’s (or Blizzard’s, as his character is called) impairment posited as a marker of evil; the disabling of his body by the erring doctor causes Blizzard’s criminal career, and the criminal’s urge for revenge for what he calls his ‘mangled years’ drives the narrative. (The revenge that Blizzard seeks is a grim one: he wants his childhood doctor to amputate the legs of the doctor’s daughter’s fiancé to then attach them to his own body.) In addition, it could be argued, the abusive behaviour of Chaney’s character towards other characters in the film might be seen as emphasised through his physical difference (Anolik 3; Punter 9).

Ethel Grey Terry and Lon Chaney in The Penalty

While Chaney’s disabled character in The Penalty would make a very interesting study of gothic embodiment, I’d like to focus on a later film, in which physical difference and amputation are constructed in a slightly different – and to me more interesting – way: the strange feature The Unknown from 1927. In this extraordinary film, Chaney plays the circus artist Alonzo the Armless who ends up amputating his arms for the woman he loves – a fellow circus artist who has a phobia about being held – only to be rejected by her.

The Unknown movie poster

The film, in the few instances of critical examination of it, has generally been read as an allegory of traumatised masculinity or lost manhood. Critical analyses of The Unknown take their cue from psychoanalysis, linking to Freud’s logic in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Freud here argues that the dream-work frequently transposes the upper and lower portions of the body so that, for example, cutting hair or pulling teeth can be symbols of castration. The amputation of Alonzo’s arms (both faked and later on genuine) follows this logic (Worland 149). Rick Worland, for example, calls the film a ‘fantastic work of psychosexual grotesquerie’, its amputatory plot presenting a ‘fever dream of phallic symbolism, castration anxiety, and sexual terror’ (144). Karen Randell argues that Lon Chaney’s films, in which he often plays grotesque and mutilated characters, are ‘doubly coded as trauma narratives’ signifying the trauma of the first world war and simultaneously the disfigured male bodies of maimed veterans from the same war (Randell 217-218). Through Alonzo’s act of, as Randell calls it, ‘symbolic castration’, the potent whole male ‘renders himself voluntarily “impotent”‘ for love’s sake (219-220).

I will try to move away from such psychoanalytic readings of the film, suggesting instead a focus on affect and the sense of touch, in exploring the shifting formulations of gothic embodiment within the piece. Affect, as Patricia Ticineto Clough formulates it, ‘refers generally to bodily capacities to affect and be affected or the augmentation or diminuition of a body’s capacity to act, to engage, and to connect’ (2). Focusing on affects may allow us to move ‘from a psychoanalytically informed criticism of subject identity representation, and trauma [such as the criticism promoted by Worland and Randell in their readings of The Unknown, I would argue], to an engagement with information and affect’ (Clough 2). Crucial to a theory and experience of embodiment is a sense of touch; embodiment and touch are inextricably connected. Jean-Luc Nancy even states in The Birth to Presence that ‘Touching one another … is what makes [bodies,] properly speaking, bodies’ (204). Furthermore, touch bears with it a double meaning: ‘a particular intimacy seems to subsist between textures and emotions … the same double meaning, tactile plus emotional, is already there in the single word “touching”; equally it’s internal to the word “feeling”‘ (Sedgwick 17). There is a conceptual slippage between touching and feeling, they are intertwined. The human hands might best embody this dual nature of touch: they explore surfaces as well as help us to express emotion in dialogue with others. Arguably, the hands are our most active tools of touching. In this context, the expressed horror of manual touch as well as the amorous amputation in The Unknown must bear a specific importance. Through a focus on gothic embodiment in terms of touch and sense, we might read Alonzo’s extraordinary action – the amputation of his arms – as an affective act, generating a more open-ended reading of the film than previous psychoanalytic approaches.

Joan Crawford and Lon Chaney in The Unknown

The film is set in ‘old Madrid’ at an unspecified point in time, at Antonio Zanzi’s ‘gypsy circus’. Released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1927 and directed by Tod Browning, it centres on the bizarre love triangle of performers ‘Alonzo the Armless’ (Chaney), Nanon Zanzi (Joan Crawford), and the circus strongman ‘Malabar the Mighty’ (Norman Kerry). The pseudo-armless Alonzo as part of his circus act fires a gun, and throws knives, using only his feet. Assisting Alonzo in his ‘death-defying act’ is Nanon, the daughter of the circus owner Zanzi, and the secret object of Alonzo’s affections. Situated in a moving vehicle, Alonzo fires the gun at the posing Nanon, shots which remove her clothes, and then throws knives which end up circuiting her bikini-clad body figure.

Alonzo is described by the circus owner as ‘the sensation of sensations!’, this expression setting out already at the start a focus on sense or sensation. He is also announced as the ‘wonder of wonders!’ As Rosemarie Garland-Thomson notes in Staring: How We Look, so-called ‘Armless Wonders’ were among the most spectacular and well-paid performers in turn-of-the-century American freak shows (133). These performers would never simply display themselves but instead performed various tricks with their feet and toes (writing calligraphy scripts, cutting out intricate paper dolls, and much more) (133). Alonzo’s feet in fact in many scenes (strumming a guitar, smoking a cigarette, pouring wine, for example) belonged to an actual armless man named Paul Desmuke, whose head and torso were concealed off-camera while his legs and toes performed the stunts in these collaborative scenes – in frame with Chaney’s upper body and face. Only Alonzo’s assistant Cojo (John George) knows that Alonzo in fact is NOT armless – he has two functional arms. When in public, Alonzo’s arms are bound to his chest with a tight corset and covered with a shirt and jacket.

Lon Chaney and John George in The Unknown

Alonzo’s love interest Nanon has a strange horror of hands and manual touch. She tells her friend in confidence: ‘Alonzo, all my life men have tried to put their beastly hands on me… to paw over me.’ She has ‘grown so that [she] shrink[s] with fear when any man touches [her]‘ with their ‘beastly hands’. Nanon’s fear becomes apparent when she is courted by the circus weight-lifter or strongman Malabar. When Malabar boasts to Nanon of his manual strength, flexing his arm muscles and grabbing her wrists, while telling her of his ‘hands that long to caress you’, Nanon struggles to get away, and the look on her face is one of terror. To Nanon, the object of gothic horror strangely seems to be not the body marked as physically different, but the normative body, emphasised even more forcefully through Malabar’s physique.

Terrified and disgusted by Malabar’s aggressive touching feeling hands, Nanon declares her abhorrence for hands, specifically those of men, exclamining: ‘Hands! Men’s hands! How I hate them!’, and indeed wishes that ‘God would … [take] the hands from all of them’. She seeks refuge with her friend Alonzo – since he is armless and thus can do her no harm.

What might Nanon’s strange fear of hands mean? It can be argued that the human hands might best embody the dual nature of touch earlier mentioned (Sedgwick’s ‘touching/feeling’, the affective character of touch): hands explore surfaces as well as help us to express emotion in dialogue with others. Garland-Thomson notes the particularity of the hands in our culture:

‘Hands make us human, or so we are told. Our opposite thumbs, the prehensile utility, agile fingers, exquisite sensitivity, sleek hairlessness, and protective nails distinguish our hands. We grasp tools, partners, enemies, and food with more accuracy and grace than our hoofed, pawed, or finned fellow creatures. … Poised for action at the end of generous and flexible arms, our hands are implement of our wills. … Hands do things. … As such, hands are witnesses to human endeavor and desire. We look to the physiology of hands for meaning.’ (119)

In this context, Nanon’s horror of manual touch and Alonzo’s later amorous amputation in The Unknown must bear a specific importance. Hands become prime markers of affective connections and negotiations between the three main characters, in their strange love triangle, and the presence or absence of hands might mark the body as either normative or specifically other, in both instances enacting or problematising different embodiments of the gothic.

Given Nanon’s fear of men’s arms and hands, Alonzo comes up with the fantastic plot of blackmailing a surgeon to amputate his arms, in order to win Nanon’s love. When Alonzo is truly without arms, surely Nanon will love him? Alonzo has his arms amputated not for medical reasons; his amputation is an act carried out for amorous or affective reasons, in order to be able to connect affectively with another body – Nanon’s. He goes through with the amputation, making himself insensible to manual cutaneous touch, seemingly without much regret.

Alonzo comes back after his surgery, arms amputated, expecting Nanon to meet him with – so to speak – open arms. However, while Alonzo has been in recovery, Nanon has in fact come to terms with the touching feeling of human hands, and is now engaged to Malabar the circus strongman. Not only is Nanon’s fear of hands gone, she declares to her old friend that she even LOVES Malabar’s hands: ‘Remember how I used to be afraid of his hands? … I am not any more. I love them now.’ This is explicitly emphasised in the acting, the bodily postures and positions of the actors: hands in focus, touching each other, in the below still.

Norman Kerry and Joan Crawford in The Unknown

Nanon has now gone from performing with Alonzo in their knife-throwing double act, to instead performing together with Malabar. Alonzo sabotages the new act, in order to get Malabar killed by having the strongman’s arms literally ripped off from his body by horses, but ends up himself being trampled to death. The film ends with the two lovers, Nanon and Malabar, embracing – and most, importantly, holding each others’ hands. The hand as signifying gothic embodiment (as expressed through Nanon’s fear) is no longer, but we recall the fate of Chaney’s character, the one marked as physically different in the story.

This piece is still a work in progress, as I have still not managed to make proper sense of the strange film. The Unknown is such rich work, and it would be difficult (and unhelpful) to try to give a conclusive or ultimate reading of it. What I hope to have shown, however, is one of the many possible readings of it, and indeed of amputation. While psychoanalysis insists on amputation as loss, as trauma (usually linked to a loss of masculinity), I wanted to present another way of reading this particular embodiment (or embodied act, perhaps). While the Gothic might be fascinated with bodies and embodiments marked as ‘other’, with physical difference, as seen in the character Nanon’s horror of hands in The Unknown also the normative body might become gothic, traumatic, horrible. Bodies and embodiments are perhaps imbued with specific significations and affects in various ways, making possible a wide range of gothic embodiments.

After reading this, you must of course be longing to see this strange film? Here it is – enjoy! The Penalty is also available online: here.

References

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Staring: How We Look. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.

Kirkup, John. A History of Limb Amputation. London: Springer, 2007.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Birth to Presence, trans. B. Holmes et al. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.

Punter, David. Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.

Anolik, Ruth Bienstock (ed.). Demons of the Body and Mind: Essays on Disability in Gothic Literature. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2010.

Randell, Karen. ‘Masking the Horror of Trauma: The Hysterical Body of Lon Chaney.’ Screen. 44.2 (Summer 2003): 216-221.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2003.

Ticineto Clough, Patricia (ed.). The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham (NC): Duke University Press, 2007.

The Unknown. Dir. Tod Browning. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1927.

Worland, Rick. The Horror Film: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007.

George A. Romero, director of the gothic horror classic Night of the Living Dead (1968), has talked about the hardships of independent filmmaking in various occasions: the lack of resources, the number of compromises that need to be made in order to please production companies, or the exigencies of an ever-changing market are often mentioned as important hindrances to creativity. Despite this, some of the best entries in horror history have been produced by highly enthusiastic individuals with a vision and love of cinema. Enter Monkeypuzzle Cinema.

Their first full-length feature film, Maps and Stars and Music (2010), a poetic and haunting picture that advertised itself as a ‘different type of ghost story’, got into the Portobello Film Festival for its premiere. It ended up winning the Best Newcomer prize with its first showing. The success of this film has inspired their creators to draft an ambitious and promising second feature, Post|Human: An Event, which promises to be an equally exciting moment in contemporary horror. Monkeypuzzle are very aware of their genre credentials, and in this interview talk to us about influences, interests and the future direction of their thoroughly gothic imagination.

How did Monkeypuzzle Cinema start?

Well, I always wanted to make films, always. And I did some stuff back when your only option if you didn’t have an inexhaustible bank account was 16mm, which was still often too expensive. Then about the turn of the century, digital filmmaking became acceptable as an aesthetic and the technology that allowed you to prepare and shoot and then do all postproduction and even distribute became more affordable, and suddenly more could be done with limited resources. Everything became possible. And so, Monkeypuzzle Cinema emerged and since genre films were always my favourite kind of cinema, although it wasn’t a stated intention, we just worked on one genre project after another.

What is it about horror cinema that you find so interesting?

How to answer that? Okay, so being obsessed with cinema from the age of four, it’s always been the genre stuff which intrigues and fascinates and feels like home. So, I think if you are honestly a cineaste, then you are more likely to embrace the abstract tones, the more musical qualities that you get in genre cinema, the notes that more realist cinema is incapable of. It’s ultimately a way more truthful genre. Life itself is a big cumulative series of events which really can’t be explained, only theorized about and that’s what genre cinema does. It’s not limited only to literal representation, it has the freedom also of metaphor, of extrapolation, of abstraction, that the more determinedly realist genres have no chance of getting to. Horror and sci-fi and fantasy use the possibilities of cinema more fully as a consequence, so you tend to find genre fans are most dedicated and more imaginative and more willing to work with the film than other kinds of filmgoers. And I think that they feel it more as well. Someone whose favourite film is something like King Kong or Psycho is more prone to be obsessive and knowledgeable and dedicated and sensitive to someone who claims a kitchen-sink director as their favourite. That isn’t cinema. That’s television and it requires no work on the part of the viewer.

Cinema is the seventh art, the culmination of all the other six and its language has only been practiced in the last hundred and twenty years. Relatively speaking, that’s no time at all. It’s essentially a new language and grammar, artistically speaking, that still is so far off from being defined and finished and is therefore incredibly exciting. It has its roots in the sensory reception that we have through our bodies as we move through the world and so it’s almost as if cinema is an answer to something the human race has always felt the need for. Horror, I find, is the form which most pushes and tests and sets out to define the grammar of cinema. So, it has a special place. Plus, childhood stories, fairy tales, Disney pictures, are nothing but horror tales in disguise, so we come to know the world around us and the people inside it in terms of horror tropes. And the workaday mundane world we are often forced to tread feels less truthful perhaps as a result of that; the inner experience of being, of moving through the world, is consistently, constantly far more profound and meaningful than the outer world’s offers of chiefly reductive experiences.

Would you say your films have a particular aesthetic that rings with this genre?

I hope so very, very much. To go back to what we said before about many things being television rather than cinema: it’s funny that the advent of digital technology, which has prompted a resurgence of low-budget British cinema, has largely manifested itself as genre work. In other words, given the opportunity to make anything at all, it seems many filmmakers are choosing to make these kinds of films.  Okay, so the last time British cinema was anything like this healthy was when producers were taking advantage of the Eady Levy in the seventies and genre was fantastically ubiquitous then, also. And so while people of my generation, and younger, had to suffer the strangled, sporadic bores of Puttnamesque prestige cinema and Channel 4 productions that should have stayed on the small screen when the native British film industry collapsed in the 1980s, we still had a sense memory of, and a desire to return to the wilder, more creative shores of earlier genre filmmaking. It wasn’t just in America that this kind of film had a golden age of sorts at this time. It was in the UK too, and many other places, too.

The British Horror Influence

And at the risk of sounding old, you had to work harder to accrue knowledge then. You had to really be dedicated to see all the things that you read you should see, to become familiar with the works of directors you knew you should become familiar with if you wanted to claim yourself a cinema fan. You had to seek it out and open it up and stare at it because it was scarcer than it is now. It wasn’t all available at the click of a mouse. And so the facts you unearthed about the makers and the stars and the studios and release dates and colour processes and the aspect ratios all became giants stomping around inside your head until you managed to catch a rare screening of something. And when you did, when you saw that film, you knew that the next time you might see it would be four years from now when ITV might get around to premiering it. So you didn’t blink, you’d let everything just sear itself into you. That kind of fanaticism would be useful now too. Not the hungry devouring and easily bored kind that maybe technology promotes, but the savouring and the extrapolating and the plain old paying attention. So you’d have taping late night films on TV, finding books on the subject and, suddenly, the world would open up. You’d read Danny Peary, you’d watch Alex Cox on Sunday nights and see that Britain had, once, one of the most strange and bizarre and sincere and nasty and funny genre heritages imaginable. And, simply put, if you really loved cinema, you just wanted to be part of that. You still do; there’s still so much to be learned and considered and enjoyed.

Although were I to have the money, it would be anamorphically shot celluloid with me all the way, the cost of digital has fallen enough that we can maybe find ourselves a place as part of this amazing heritage. You know, it’s lamentable: somewhere like Japan has, as a country, used its own myth and legend and values as staples of genre cinema, and has them consistently reinterpreted and reformed and re-embraced, whereas Britain has no solid filmic history of using national myth and character to make films of scope and iconic intent. And this is partly where the question of aesthetics comes in, because we need to be more mindful that the primary source of communication in any art is the medium itself. The medium is the message, yes, but more specifically and more deliberately than that, the style is the content. We shouldn’t be afraid of that. It doesn’t mean a lack of substance, it just means you are asking more of your audience’s skill and imagination to be able to read and discern that substance. If you look at single camera television now and much of cinema, there is very little, in terms of grammar and mise-en-scène to distinguish them from one another. This hand-held aesthetic of constantly wobbling and shifting attempts to find framing and focus has become so prevalent in the most mundane of settings as to become absolutely meaningless.

Now, it’s true that this has probably only become so because it’s the laziest and easiest way of shooting; construction doesn’t even have to take up a glimmer of thought until the editing stage. But as genre filmmakers we should be learning lessons that were fought for us and understand that being a formalist is not a bad thing. Just the opposite. I want to be a better formalist all the time. And so, the aesthetics of our work, I hope are a signifier of that. The greats were all formalists, I mean Hitchcock never stopped being so, and more of us could do with trying to use the lessons of the masters who understood forms like music, where the expression, the timbre, the melody and so on are the primary communicators of meaning. Film is the same. It’s harmonies and melodies and rhythms. Film is musical, it is not literary.

Post/Human: An Event promises to be one of the best independent horror films in years. Can you tell us a bit more about what sparked this project?

It’s a long and twisty road. We wrote something called Focus, which was a determined attempt at one genre that brutally changes halfway through its running time and becomes a completely different one. It will be challenging to shoot, as much of it has to be funny – old-fashioned, fully physical, gracefully, expertly-timed funny. And it really has to work or nothing else will. Right now, I’m not ready for meticulous physical comedy, so that’s been put aside for later. Then Maps and Stars and Music was written, full of this heavy, worried obsession with how experience and history weigh on you. And it was nice to make something almost sort of cosmically bedazzled and beguiled. It was received very well, and next I wanted to do something that was pure genre cinema, almost brazen in its joy as being a full-strength, members-only, no-newbies allowed horror film. So I wrote SeaWitch which I think will be great one day, very sweet and poetic and Georges Franju, and at the same time, nasty, nasty stuff. I tried hard to get that made, but it turned out that the setting demanded a remote port town which, when you haven’t got much money, is very difficult, especially if you want to take stunts and blood and full-scale violence there with you. So, then I decided, it’s slasher time, let’s just take the most delineated, propelled, A-B-C form there is and just be pure and don’t look either side and run through one of these scripts as quick and headlong as possible.

Maps and Stars and Music (Trailer)

But writing takes you where it wants to, and I was glad it did because re-watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre by chance made me remember that that idea was perfected nearly forty years ago and has remained without equal or rival since. So, Post|Human became something woozier again, but this time punctuated with pinpoint horror and very specific angsts, both eternal and contemporary. It became something that could hold a lot of diffused concerns and themes and still carry them with pace in a very defined setting and time frame. I wrote it very specifically with an eye on being able to put it into physical production with the select resources available to us while at the same time remembering you have to be big and smart and you have to really push things. Good genre audiences are very savvy for the most part; they can sense staleness and insincerity and a lack of effort a mile away.

And so as you write this, the ideas take off and you incorporate what you worry about as a human being, namely what a strenuous and terrifying and uncertain time we live in, a time when technological progression moves so exponentially faster than ever before. We are unable to see even a decade in front of our noses. And we are able to, for the first time in human history, have the means to begin a denial of the inherent atrophy our fleshly beings are subject to with the incipient, large-scale application of technology into our very selves. All the while we are communicating in ever more prolific, yet distant and oblique, ways in the midst of all this, or rather around all this, and certainly, I should think, because of all this, the much mooted death of god stance we should have reasonably expected from the 21^st century has itself died. Suddenly fanaticism and extremism, and even just widespread ‘faith’, has made us this creature of absolute contrasts. And the thing about that kind of creature is that extreme spectrums don’t make for happy balances.

So, what am I saying? It strikes me, and I know that very generation must feel this, that these are the strangest and most terrifying times in which to be living. So far. And so this got me to thinking, too, of transhumanism and posthumanism and what they might mean for us, and what happens if we start to rid of ourselves of the atrophic qualities of mortality by gaining dominion of the course of our flesh’s destiny and what that means about the deities people believe in, or more accurately what that means to people who believe in deities. And then we have to incorporate all of this into the existential anxieties and how do they change each other? I mean… it goes on. And I thought the only form where you can do all this, and a thousand other things altogether, and not be messy, diffused or disparate is the horror film. More precisely, in the science-fiction horror film. And so I make things in this genre because it strikes me that our workaday experience of the world in our everyday lives is pretty much a technological science-fictional one. And when you add the human element to that, there you’ve got your horror covered. In short, it’s a horror science-fiction because, with our disconnection and increasing hollowness amongst the increasing noise, real, lived life seems to have become horror science-fiction itself.

The Metaphysical SF Influence

The promotional images have a very uncanny resonance that mixes interestingly with rich colours and what looks like a very artistic take on the slasher. What are your frames of references?

Okay, well, I’m tired of bleach bypass imitations in films. I’m tired of the moss-green or steel-blue aesthetics of the lazy digital colourist. All these technology and we put it in service of quasi-monochromatic dullness that, again, is such an unthought-through destination as to be absolutely meaningless. Literally. And I find colour-to-greyscale grading to never get the complexities and beauties of genuine black and white right, and so I am going for colour. Varied, careful, active colour in the same frame, in each scene, across the whole film. I love colour. I love the diffusion of people like Geoffrey Unsworth. I love the look of Brian De Palma’s red period films. The belligerent person in me wants to fight against this modern notion that pushed clarity or definition is automatically the choice to be made. I want to evoke natural grain, or as close to a chemical representation of it as my digital medium will allow. I want legitimate, diegetic and justifiable lens flares and I wish I could go for the squeezed blurs of anamorphic. That last matter has yet to be decided on, even though we are shooting for hard-matted scope. Really, in short, even though we are shooting digital, I want a classical film aesthetic, from mise-en-scène to lighting, to composition through to camera movement and editing pattern. And there are tricks and techniques you can do to get there and I love that they take time. And I love that they are hard to do, because the curmudgeon in me thinks the only reason that so much stuff now has this one-note, high contrast and immediately boring aesthetic is the ease of default settings on editing programmes.

Frames of references… well, we look at Asian cinema of the sixties and the nature of colour in those that really had as much to do with the meaning as any part of the narrative, we look at films by the Archers, by Hitchcock, early Spielberg, Bergman, Polanski, Brahms, George Miller, Tarkovsky, Landis, Lewis, De Palma, Kubrick and lighting people like Unsworth, Zsigmond, Slocombe, Cardiff, Challis, Freddie Francis. I’m just naming people now, but you can’t help but do that. It’s because you love all these people and you would be happy to do just a fraction of what they were and are able to do.

The Asian Horror Influence

You have partly answered this question already, but what is Post/Human about?

Well, without giving too much away, a young woman journeys back to the mental hospital/ research facility where her deceased mother once worked many years before. There she finds that time isn’t as linear as we might want and that there are some very terrible, cosmic secrets being held there. I’m never very good at synopses. There’s a nice lot of apocalyptic paranoia in it, too. Particularly nuclear paranoia. It’s this strange memory of diving into cinema at around the time of the last great spike in nuclear paranoia in the early 80s, where protect and survive leaflets were pushed through every door in the country which stated conflict as a certainty and which advised you on how to rid your home of the dead bodies of relatives after an attack. Add to this the way cinema reacted to the anxiety of this unthinkable subject and… Well, I think it’s a strain of genre cinema that really needs a comeback. The world is more unstable in this regard than ever before and it would be nice to see some good, strong nuclear metaphors and representations again. But that’s only what a bit of it is about. I think it’s a smart and insidious and creepy and scary film, and I think it’s sad and I think it’s aiming for beautiful, too, which I like horror to be, too. I love how genre fans can understand how other genre fans see beauty in the most unlikely of places and images. It’s nice. It feels like we are smarter than those who don’t get the genre, which, let’s face it, we are.

Post/Human (Video)

You are currently sourcing funding for this project. Why should horror enthusiasts support Post/Human?

Firstly, because we mean it, and all genuine genre fans mean it. Sometimes this genre can be used for cheap fashion or easy irony, but if you really love it, you know the price you have to pay for doing so. You have to become in many ways one of the ‘sadder but wiser’ group, but you also understand what it does for you and you are glad to pay that price. It isn’t something that should be worn too heavily, but real fans don’t do it for ironic reasons, they tire of people who laugh at Hammer’s flying vampire bats, they tire of people saying grindhouse when they should be saying fleapits; they carry on regardless through the periodic co-opting of our beloved form by people who lack knowledge and understanding. And they keep hopeful and optimistic always that something significant and important is just around the corner. There is nobody more optimistic than a horror fan and there is no-one happier than a horror fan whose optimism is proven to be justified. And I think we do it because the genre loves us back. I’m sure most of us have felt protected or validated or understood by the genre at least once in our lives when nothing else seems to have provided that for us. And I’m even surer that many of us still feel like that on a daily basis in some respects. It’s a genre that has inspired the most dedication since the dawn of cinema and will never fade. Cinema is illusion pieced together the right way to attain a truth and occasionally the truth. And that’s a fitting description of the metaphors at the heart of horror. And genre fans know this and they know other genre fans know it. So we’re sincere, horror fans. Like you are, like your readers are. Simply put, it’s important.

Secondly, British cinema needs support still. Its burgeoning, resurgent horror scene is something that, for the first time in a lifetime, could be something of real significance. And crowdsourcing is something that is too immediately on the precipice of being co-opted by selfish types who don’t need it. It’s another grass-roots movement born of necessity because there are literally no other means available to get your resources to tell the story you want to tell. And, suddenly, Warner brothers and Zach Braff are on there, stating flippantly that it’s because they have nothing to lose, cap in hand and helping usher the crowdsourcing movement into the realm of another exploitation tool used to protect money and ensure their own future. It’s horrific to see so many people like me, and I’m sure a good proportion of your readers, in danger of losing the one option available to us to achieve the once unachievable – making a film.

Lastly, I think it will be good. I mean, really good. Our script is good, our designs and plans and performers and ideas and senses are good. It will be good. It’s smart too. It would be wonderful if people were kind enough to support us, because this is a culmination of sorts. I think all genre fans have their own epiphany moment, when that book had that paragraph, when the film had that scene, when the world revealed its little secret that the normal folks weren’t privy too. I had mine, too, and its conclusion was ‘you need to make one of these films, too.’ And it’s decades later and I’m trying to.

Monkeypuzzle Cinema’s crowdsourcing page is strictly limited-time and may be accessed by following this link. Please check it out and donate:

www.igg.me/at/monkeypuzzlecinema

If you would like to have a look at previous projects, find out more information, receive newsfeeds, or get in touch with Monkeypuzzle Cinema, their webpage is www.monkeypuzzlecinema, and their Twitter feed is (@mpuzzlecinema).

We invite paper and panel proposals on topics related to silences, disjunctions, and absences in Romantic-era texts, for a one-day conference hosted by the School of English and the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Queen’s University Belfast on 2 August, 2013. The keynote speaker will be Dr Fiona Price, Reader in English Literature at the University of Chichester.

The conference is interested in exploring the power of silences and absences in the literature of the period c.1780-1830. During this time there is significant cultural emphasis on what is not said and why: being silenced and choosing silence touch upon complex issues of power, resistance, and subjection. Generic developments such as the Gothic tradition of the found manuscript and textual fragment could be said to reflect a wider instability surrounding narrative completeness and coherence, while editorial interventions and authorial revisions naturalise practices of erasure and suppression. Recent critical trends make this area particularly fertile ground for study: over the past few decades, criticism has focused on the messy process by which texts come into being, demystifying Romantic notions of authority and textual integrity. The ever-expanding boundaries of canonicity and the recovery of figures operating in literary and social gaps have also made previously suppressed and lost narratives available for critical scrutiny. We are thus seeking papers on lacunae within and between texts, in literary history, and in critical practice.

Proposals of 250 words should be sent to Dr Deborah Russell and Dr Lucy Cogan at romanticlacunae@gmail.com by 1 June, 2013. We would especially welcome papers with a connection to Ireland and/or concepts of identity and community in ‘four nations’ Romanticism.

Topics might include (but are not limited to):

• Muteness: voluntary and involuntary silences
• Memory and forgetting
• Lost traditions and lost texts
• Fragments and incomplete narratives
• Absences and loss or mourning
• Editorial deletions and/or alterations
• Erasure from history and historiographical narratives
• Displacement
• Suppressed narratives of class, race, or gender
• The unsaid and the unsayable
• Censorship and self-censorship
• Digital Humanities and missing text(s)

The three blog posts will concern, in very broad terms, gothic sexualities, gothic bodies and affections, and gothic socioeconomic structures, focusing on specific texts through which I consider these topics. The three posts will be taken from work I’ve done previously, work I’m currently doing, and lastly (in a post that might be embarrassingly tentative) work that I’m just starting out on. Any comments or suggestions you might have on the writings would be very much welcome.

First up is a subject I wrote on for a book chapter some time ago: female necrophilia.

Beardsley, 'The Dancer's Reward'

If, as Fred Botting has posited, the gothic is characterised by transgression as well as excess, then necrophilia might be one of the most gothic sexual practices. Transgressing the bounds of reality and possibility, Botting states, gothic narratives may ‘subvert rational codes of understanding’ and thus ‘blurring definitions of reason and morality’ (6). Gothic texts are open to a play of ambivalence, ‘a dynamic of limit and transgression that both restores and contests boundaries’ (9). Often considered the most horrible or unspeakable of sexual aberrations, necrophilia – a sexual attraction to corpses – could arguably be considered the ultimate transgression between life and death. Cast as a kind of gothic sexuality, necrophilia might work to question established social orders and norms. And, as I hope to sketch out in this post, female necrophilia might work also as a specifically gendered transgression.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines necrophilia as a ‘[f]ascination with death and dead bodies; esp. sexual attraction to, or intercourse with, dead bodies’. The term necrophilia first gained recognition through Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s groundbreaking sexological work Psychopathia Sexualis (1886, English translation 1892), where Krafft-Ebing gives examples of this ‘horrible kind of sexual indulgence … so monstrous … abnormal and decidedly perverse’ (430). Sigmund Freud mentions necrophilia only in passing in his lecture ‘The Sexual Life of Human Beings’ (1916), before cutting himself short by exclaiming: ‘But enough of this kind of horror!’ (306). As Botting notes, the horrors of transgression in gothic texts may also become means to reassert the values of society: ‘transgression, by crossing the social and aesthetic limits, serves to reinforce or underline their value and necessity, restoring or defining limits’ (7). To Krafft-Ebing and Freud at least, necrophilia seems to be the biggest taboo of all.

The main contemporary investigation of necrophilia was until recently the 1989 study by Jonathan Rosman and Phillip Resnick, which classifies necrophilia into three types: necrophilic fantasy, ‘regular’ necrophilia, and necrophilic homicide. The most common motive for necrophilia is posed as possession of an unresisting and unrejecting partner (154-6, 158). An example of this can be found in sexologist Havelock Ellis’s ‘Erotic Symbolism’ (1906), where a young man has been digging up the bodies of young girls ‘to satisfy his passions with’. He explains his behavior by not finding anyone who would have sex with him: ‘”As living women felt nothing but repulsion for me, it was quite natural that I should turn to the dead, who have never repulsed me”‘ (81-2). The image of the necrophiliac is here almost always male. Krafft-Ebing and Freud provide only male cases, and of the 122 cases that Rosman and Resnick analyse, ninety-five percent are male – all necrophilic homicides were committed by men (156).

Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis

‘for mine own pleasure’

Female necrophilia then might be seen as not only transgressing boundaries of life and death, or what might be the biggest sexual taboo, but also as transgressing prescribed gender roles. If the possession on an unrejecting partner is the most common motive for necrophilia, what happens when the passive, unresisting partner is male? Figurations of death, as Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin argue, ‘bring into play the binary tensions of gender constructs, as life/death engages permutations with masculinity/femininity and with fantasies of power’ (20). Similarly, the desire for the dead, as Lisa Downing states, might open up to notions of ‘plural and shifting identification, unstable gender positions, and the undermining of heterosexuality and genital sex as natural and inevitable’ (131).

There are various examples of female necrophilia, both in literature and in terms of ‘real-life’ cases. One of the most famous literary depictions of female necrophilia is Oscar Wilde’s figuration of Salome (from the 1891 play of the same name). After falling in love with and having been rebuked by Jokanaan (Wilde’s figuring of John the Baptist), Salome demands the head of her lover on a silver charger. She states that she wants his head ‘for mine own pleasure’ (29), and, when given it, she caresses and kisses it fondly: ‘Ah! thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan. Well! I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit’. In this manner she can finally control her previously resisting lover: ‘Thou wouldst have none of me, Jokanaan. Thou rejectedst me. Thou didst speak evil words against me. … Well, I still live, but thou art dead, and thy head belongs to me. I can do with it what I will’ (34-5). Salome here actively desires, and obtains, her now unresisting partner, much like the statistically and culturally overrepresented male necrophiliac.

Beardsley, 'The Kiss'

‘How does she do it?’

The most famous ‘real-life’ case must be Karen Greenlee (1956-), a necrophiliac and former funeral worker, who in 1979 in California, at the age of 23, was arrested for necrophilic activities after having abducted a corpse and confessed to further similar episodes. In a 1985 interview, Greenlee explains her necrophiliac desires, stating that the most common question she receives is: ‘How does she do it?’ ‘I don’t mind telling people how I do it’, she says: ‘It doesn’t matter to me, but anyone adept sexually shouldn’t have to ask. People have this misconception that there has to be penetration for sexual gratification, which is bull! The most sensitive part of a woman is the front area anyway and that is what needs to be stimulated. Besides, there are different aspects of sexual expression: touchy-feely, 69, even holding hands’ (29). Here, Greenlee questions the heteronormative focus on penetration, a focus which might be one of the reasons that lead to necrophilia being considered a mainly male desire, and to the discrediting of female necrophilia. As Downing notes, the repeated focus in medical writing on penetration of the corpse ‘implicitly relegates necrophilia to the realms of male perversion’ (3). The figure of the female necrophiliac here challenges traditional oppositional and hierarchical sexual configurations, perhaps, as Patricia MacCormack argues, affecting us ‘into thinking – or unthinking – the body differently’, affording ‘reorientations or challenges in reference to gender and sexual act’ (par. 26). Not only transgressing the accepted boundaries of life and death, figurations of female necrophilia also transgress traditional notions of gendered and sexual practices.

Karen Greenlee, newspaper clipping 1979/1980

‘Necrophiles aren’t supposed to be blond and pretty, let alone female’

Greenlee’s case laid the basis for Barbara Gowdy’s short story ‘We So Seldom Look on Love’ (1992), and its exploration of what is considered ‘normal’ sexual behaviour. This story, which also later inspired the full-length film Kissed (1996), in many ways follows Greenlee’s own account of her experiences, further investigating female necrophilic eroticism as a potential way of negotiating traditional gender roles. Like Greenlee, the main character and unnamed narrator of the story is interested in death even as a child, burying dead animals in complex ceremonies. Instead of such interests more common among her classmates, at age thirteen she develops a ‘craving to perform autopsies’ (149), and after having cut up animals for some time, by the time she is sixteen she ‘want[s] human corpses’ (150). She starts working as a hearse driver at a funeral home, and studies embalming at night. The narrator never lets anyone else in the story know of her desires and, in turn, no one suspects her. She is even asked to enter the town’s beauty pageant; concerning this, she remarks ironically: ‘Necrophiles aren’t supposed to be blond and pretty, let alone female’ (151). Like Greenlee, the narrator confesses to being asked the question of ‘how does she do it?’: ‘For fifteen years, ever since Matt died, people have been asking me how a woman makes love to a corpse’ (151). Once again, the figure of the female necrophiliac destabilises conceptions of any reproductive sexuality. Matt is a medical student in love with the narrator, and also the first person to whom the narrator discloses her obsession. They meet regularly, and have sex, but after every encounter with him she goes straight to the mortuary; her attempts at ‘normal’ sexual behaviour do not pertain for long.

There is an interesting focus on the question of activity and passivity in Gowdy’s story. While Rosman and Resnick pose the possession on an unrejecting partner as the most common motive for necrophilia, in Gowdy’s short story the passive, unresisting partner is male. When visiting the corpses, the narrator actively seeks them out, climbing onto the table, and straddles the body; she plays the active part. These meetings are juxtaposed with her and Matt’s sexual encounters, in which she plays the passive part, the part of the corpse: ‘With Matt, when we made love, I was the receiving end, I was the cadaver. When I left him and went to the funeral home, I was the lover’ (154). Her passive sexual encounters with Matt become a sort of foreplay to her ‘real’ sexual activities as a necrophiliac.

Gowdy, We So Seldom Look on Love

Like Wilde’s Salome, who actively desires her dead lover’s head ‘for mine own pleasure’, the figure of the female necrophiliac by expressing her own desire might open up possibilities for the reworking of prevalent notions of gender and sexuality. Female necrophilia can thus be seen as potentially transgressing not only the boundaries of life and death, or more broadly ‘the values of society, virtue and propriety’ (Botting 7), but also as destabilising heteronormative conceptions of gender and of reproductive sexual desire and practices. Transgressing not only aesthetic boundaries, but also specifically gendered ones, female necrophilia might indeed function as a kind of gothic sexuality.

(A note: The research for the topic has caused me both amusement and, perhaps not surprisingly, some less pleasant experiences. Those of you who maintain academia.edu pages will be familiar with the google function where one will see what search words people use to find one’s page. While many people who find my page want more information on Karen Greenlee, on literary Victorian depictions of necrophilia, or simply want to know whether female necrophiliacs exist, there are also some people searching for ‘real necrophilia download’ or ‘sex with dead women’ and other more disturbing terms. My text on female necrophilia was an attempt to rethink the concept and literary trope of necrophilia in order to question the gendered assumptions many people have about sex, critiquing heteronormative constructions of sexuality. Needless to say, any sex act that isn’t consensual must be considered rape (a notion from which stemmed Stewart Home’s necrocard stunt) – which I hope the authors of creepy search terms on google will some day understand.)

References

Botting, Fred. The Gothic. London; New York: Routledge, 1995.

Bronfen, Elisabeth and Sarah Webster Goodwin. ‘Introduction.’ Death and Representation. Ed. Elisabeth Bronfen and Sarah Webster Goodwin. Baltimore; London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1993. 3-25.

Downing, Lisa. Desiring the Dead: Necrophilia and Nineteenth-Century French Literature. Oxford: Legenda, 2003.

Ellis, Havelock. ‘Erotic Symbolism.’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 5. Philadelphia: F. A. Davis Co., 1906. 1-114.

Freud, Sigmund. ‘The Sexual Life of Human Beings.’ 1916. Trans. James Strachey. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 16. Ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1963. 303-319.

Gowdy, Barbara. We So Seldom Look on Love. New York: Harper Collins, 1992.

Krafft-Ebing, Richard. Psychopathia Sexualis. 1886. Trans. Charles Gilbert Chaddock. Philadelphia; London: The F. A. Davis Co., 1892.

MacCormack, Patricia. ‘Necrosexuality.’ Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 11/12 (2005/2006).

‘necrophilia, n.’ Oxford English Dictionary. 13 May 2011.

Rosman, Jonathan P. and Phillip J. Resnick. ‘Sexual Attraction to Corpses: A Psychiatric Review of Necrophilia.’ Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 17 (1989): 153–163.

‘The Unrepentant Necrophile: An Interview with Karen Greenlee.’ 1985. Apocalypse Culture. Ed. Adam Parfrey. Portland: Feral House, 1990. 28-35.

Wilde, Oscar. Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act. 1891. [English translation 1894.] Boston: Branding Publishing Company, 1989.

favourites such as Bram Stoker and John Connolly will come to mind, but hopefully The Green Book also will serve as an introduction to Ireland’s other notable fantasists: like Fitz-James O’Brien, Lafcadio Hearn, William Allingham, Sheridan Le Fanu, Cherio, Mrs. Riddell, Harry Clarke, Lord Dunsany, Elizabeth Bowen, Mervyn Wall, Conor McPherson . . . this list is by no means exhaustive.

Do check the website out for more details, including submission guidelines and the Editor’s Note from issue 1: http://www.swanriverpress.ie/greenbook.html.

Book Review: Christopher MacLachlan, John Patrick Pazdziora & Ginger Stelle (eds.) Rethinking George MacDonald: Contexts and Contemporaries (Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2013).

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. This covers an impressive range of topics: from epistemology to eugenics, social reform, the Gothic and MacDonald’s fantasy writing. Certainly, the collection suggests that the field of MacDonald studies is an engaging area worthy of further academic attention. The case for scholarship to read MacDonald’s work alongside his contemporaries is made from the outset in Stephen Prickett’s ‘The Idea of Tradition in George MacDonald.’ What is deeply striking, not only in Prickett’s chapter but across the entire collection, are the ways in which MacDonald, when read alongside his contemporaries, is deeply engaged with many issues of his day and presents often distinct, progressive views and solutions in his works.

As this review is for The Gothic Imagination, it is worth noting that the ‘Ideals and Nightmares’ section of the collection contains two essays that engage directly with Gothic themes: David Melville Wingrove’s ”La Belle Dame’-Lilith and the Romantic Vampire Tradition’ argues that Lilith has be unfairly left out of the canon of Victorian vampire fiction, providing a strong reading of the text which aligns it with other writers including Goethe, Coleridge, Tieck, Gautier, Keats, Poe, Baudelaire, Le Fanu, Stevenson, and Stoker. Jennifer Koopman’s ‘Gothic Degeneration and Romantic Rebirth in Donal Grant’ discusses how the Gothic motifs within Donal Grant are used to critique the Romantic movement and some of its key figures, including Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. These chapters show how the Gothic aspects of MacDonald’s writing have been overlooked in previous scholarship. Wingrove and Koopman have demonstrated that there is a great deal of scope for further study of the Gothic themes in MacDonald’s work.

This collection succeeds in its aim to show how MacDonald relates to his contemporaries and by doing so it draws attention to MacDonald as a figure deserving of more recognition within Victorian Literary studies. While achieving this aim the collection also displays the difficulties of moving beyond seeing MacDonald’s work in terms of the themes of religion and fantasy that concern his modern followers. All of the chapters do deal with these aspects of his works to some extent although they are related to MacDonald among his contemporaries. This is indicative of the challenges which MacDonald scholarship faces. It is refreshing to see the theological and fantasy aspects of MacDonald’s corpus being related to his own period and contemporaries rather than being interpreted through his role as the forefather of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Rethinking George MacDonald: Contexts and Contemporaries is a highly suggestive collection that covers a large range of themes and issues that MacDonald engages with through his work. The breadth of the collection provides much inspiration for further research. In addition to providing invigorating sketches of MacDonald’s approaches to specific texts and themes, the overall portrait of MacDonald is as a deeply engaged Victorian, involved in many aspects of the social, political, literary and theological debates of the time. Appropriate for MacDonald enthusiasts, Victorian scholars and those seeking an introduction to MacDonald’s range of work, the book is a timely addition to scholarship in this field, and it makes a convincing case that there is a great deal more critical engagement to be undertaken regarding George MacDonald.

Fans of Gothic fiction should note that Gothic Press — which for some years has published widely on the Gothic — has a new web address. You can access the new site at http://www.gothlitdata.com/gothicpress.html.

Also, take a look at their very interesting Gothic Chapbook series: http://www.gothlitdata.com/gothchap.html

*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 history, and the Shelleys themselves, attempted to bury.

The novel follows Charles Maddox, a young detective in London, commissioned to investigate a potential blackmail threat to Mary Shelley, her son Sir Percy Shelley and his wife. Long had the Shelleys sought to privatise their lives, and their curious past, and action must be taken to prevent the emergence of the truth and the potential publication of their dark and enigmatic history. Maddox, however, unintentionally finds himself entangled in the numerous webs of deception, secrecy and mystery spun by the Shelleys, unaware of the vastness of his investigative undertaking, and the close proximity of their past to his own personal life.

Shepherd takes on the challenge of addressing many of the unanswered questions and scandalous gaps in history, in a very interesting and evocative manner. Ranging from Shelley’s claim that someone tried to murder him in North Wales in February 1813, the tragic death of his first wife Harriet Shelley and the seemingly horrific luck regarding Percy and Mary’s children; Shepherd offers an insightful and persuasive re-imagining of the Shelley story, and she seeks to offer the answers that history has failed to provide, whether down to lack of evidence or a more sinister cloaking of the truth.

The novel is thrilling, fast-paced and extremely interesting, fruitful with Gothic characters and settings, and demonstrates excellently the vast amount of both historical and biographical research that Shepherd undertook in the writing of the novel. Not only does A Treacherous Likeness feature an engaging level of historical accuracy, but also an excellent representation of notable figures such as William Godwin, Claire Clairemont, and many other characters intertwined in the Shelley’s history. Shepherd also seeks to investigate further the figure of Percy Bysshe Shelley himself, offering her own psychological insight into his erratic and infamous personality. As the novel unravels, it is clear that Shelley found himself drowning in his own radical ideals of life and love, embroiled with numerous wives and lovers, illegitimate children, murder and suicide; and it is this representation of Shelley that I found most intriguing and gripping.

However, it is Shepherd’s portrayal of Mary Shelley that could be described as most controversial. Thanks to her free-thinking parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, Mary was understandably a confident and educated young woman. Shepherd demonstrates this wonderfully, yet elaborates further, as she portrays Mary as a cold-hearted, selfish and psychologically damaged woman. Along with the doubt surrounding the true authorship of Frankenstein, Shepherd attempts to examine the involvement of Mary in the suicide of Harriet Shelley, and the relationship she had with Percy and her family. Perhaps most controversial, and potentially to the dismay of Mary Shelley fans, is her account of the deaths of the Shelley children. It is here that you can personally decide for yourself what you believe about Mary Shelley’s life, her marriage and the fate of her children; all thanks to the imaginative workings of Shepherd and the wonderfully deep historical context she plants them in.

Overall, the novel is a rich, successful attempt at weaving a highly-imaginative narrative through historical fact. Mystery, secrecy and thrills are in abundance as the story unravels, leaving you turning the pages eagerly, ever in pursuit of the truth, through a fantastic variety of fictional letters and accounts. Shepherd’s historical research gives this novel the kick it really needs, and I felt her own personal opinion was interesting, brave and extremely throught-provoking. This is a great novel that deserves a read, particularly if you’re interested in the young Romantics, and the ever-mysterious lives of the infamous, and fantastic, Shelleys.