Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural

350 Pages·2012·2.26 MB·English

by  Victoria Nelson

gothick a
victoria nelson
The dream avatar Paprika swallows the corporate patriarch and his dark dream.
From the anime fi lm Paprika (2006), directed by Satoshi Kon.
victoria nelson
gothicka
Vampire Heroes,
Human Gods,
and the New Supernatural
harvard university press
cambridge, massachusetts & london, en gland 2012
■
Copyright © 2012 by Victoria Nelson.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
The verse translation from The Danse Macabre of Women by Ann Tukey Harrison
is reprinted by permission of The Kent State University Press.
“My Father’s Wedding” from THE MAN IN THE BLACK COAT TURNS
by Robert Bly. Copyright © 1981 by Robert Bly. Reprinted by permission of
Georges Borchardt, Inc., for Robert Bly.
Library of Congress Cataloging-i n- Publication Data
Nelson, Victoria.
Gothicka : vampire heroes, human gods, and the new supernatural / Victoria
Nelson.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0 - 674-0 5014-3 (alk. paper)
1. Gothic fi ction (Literary genre)— History and criticism. 2. Gothic revival
(Literature)— History and criticism. 3. Horror tales—H istory and criticism.
4. Spirituality in literature. 5. Horror fi lms—H istory and criticism.
6. Horror comic books, strips, etc.— History and criticism. 7. Goth culture
(Subculture)— History and criticism. I. Title.
PN3435.N45 2012
700'.415—dc23 2011041651
For Frank, who likes the Gothick,
and his bright future

contents
Preface ix
one White Dog, the Prequel 1
Between Imagination and Belief
two Faux Catholic 21
A Gothick Genealogy from Monk Lewis to Dan Brown
three Gothick Gods 45
The Worshipful World of Horror Fandom
four Decommissioning Satan 73
In Favor of His Man- God Whelps
five Gothick Romance 95
The Danse Macabre of Women
six The Bright God Beckons 117
The New Vampire Romance
seven Postapocalyptic Gothick 149
That Means Zombies (and the Occasional Zampire)
eight The Gothick Theater of Halloween 169
Performing Allegory
nine The Ten Rules of Sitges 189
Global Gothick Horror and Beyond
ten Cathedral Head 219
The Gothick Cosmos of Guillermo del Toro
eleven The New Christian Gothick 239
The Shack and Other Cathedrals
twelve Epilogue 261
Questions without Answers
Notes 269
Ack now ledg ments 319
Index 321
Title page of a Gothick novel in the Hammond Collection.
Courtesy of the New York Society Library.
preface
The boy’s novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense, which is only like
saying that a modern novel is ignorant in the chemical sense, or the economic
sense, or the astronomical sense; but it is not vulgar intrinsically— it is the
actual centre of a million fl aming imaginations.
—G. K. Chesterton, “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls”
In 1811, a Newport, Rhode Island, dry goods merchant named James Ham-
mond founded a lending library upstairs from his shop that quickly grew to
8,000 volumes of pop u lar fi ction with a scattering of playscripts and poetry.
And this fi ction, the ancestor of the modern mass paperback, was very pop-
u lar indeed; a single novel, usually printed in three volumes, circulated as
many as 400 to 500 times. Hammond’s clients devoured the nineteenth-
century equivalent of airport novels not in economy-c lass coach but in real
coaches and in sitting rooms up and down the northeastern seaboard of the
new country. They also wrote and drew on the inside front and back covers,
tore out illustrations that caught their eye, and generally read the books to
pieces. Today the bindings of these volumes literally fall apart when they
are opened, leaving a trail of shredded orange pigskin on the surface of the
Rare Book Room reading table at the New York Society Library.
What manner of literary fare w ere the good folk of Newport so eagerly
consuming? Sensational Gothick fi ction full of violence, sexual assault,