This week’s hair-raising read is 2013’s SUMMERVILLE by D.T. Neal. The story follows three friends who are planning to dive for some expensive brandy bottles they believe are sitting at the bottom of a South Carolina River. When the group encounters a hitchhiker to whom they decide to offer a ride, a series of events are put into motion that leaves no one unscathed. Part southern gothic and part ecohorror, this novella takes some big swings but do they pay off? Listen to the latest episode of The Bloodcurdling Book Club to find out!
Selected Reading on the Ecogothic:
Bondar, Alanna F. “Bodies on earth: Exploring sites of the Canadian ecoGothic.” Ecogothic. Manchester University Press, 2015.
Deam, Natalie. “Victor Hugo’s Pieuvre and the Marine EcoGothic.” Gothic Animals. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2020. 257-272.
Elbert, Monika, and Wendy Ryden. “EcoGothic Disjunctions: Natural and Supernatural Liminality in Sarah Orne Jewett’s Haunted Landscapes.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 24.3 (2017): 496-513.
Estok, Simon C. “Corporeality, hyper-consciousness, and the Anthropocene ecoGothic: slime and ecophobia.” Neohelicon 47.1 (2020): 27-39.
Fitzpatrick, Teresa. “Green is the new black: Plant monsters as ecoGothic tropes; vampires and femmes fatales.” EcoGothic Gardens in the Long Nineteenth Century. Manchester University Press, 2020.
Hillard, Tom J. “From Salem witch to Blair Witch: The puritan influence on American gothic nature.” Ecogothic. Manchester University Press, 2015.
Hughes, William. “‘A strange kind of evil’: Superficial paganism and false ecology in The Wicker Man.” Ecogothic. Manchester University Press, 2015.
Keetley, Dawn, and Angela Tenga, eds. Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Keetley, Dawn, and Matthew Wynn Sivils, eds. Ecogothic in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Routledge, 2017.
Kröger, Lisa. “Panic, paranoia and pathos: Ecocriticism in the eighteenth century Gothic novel.” Ecogothic. Manchester University Press, 2015.
Lanone, Catherine. “Monsters on the Ice and Global Warming: From Mary Shelley and Sir John Franklin to Margaret Atwood and Dan Simmons.” Ecogothic. Manchester University Press, 2015.
Packham, Jimmy. “Children of the Quorn: the vegetarian, raw, and the horrors of vegetarianism.” Gothic Nature: New Directions in Eco-Horror and the EcoGothic 1 (2019): 78-102.
Parker, Elizabeth. The Forest and the EcoGothic. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.
Roberts, Suzanne L. The EcoGothic: Pastoral Ideologies in the Gendered Gothic Landscape. University of Nevada, Reno, 2008.
Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes. “Introduction: Defining the ecogothic.” Ecogothic. Manchester University Press, 2015.
Steinroetter, Vanessa. “Unsettling Landscapes: Prairie Madness and EcoGothic Themes in US Plains Literature.” Great Plains Quarterly 39.3 (2019): 291-310.
Tyburski, Susan J. “A Gothic apocalypse: Encountering the monstrous in American cinema.” Ecogothic. Manchester University Press, 2015.
Tyburski, Susan J. “Seduced by the wild: Audrey Shulman’s ecoGothic romance.” Gothic Transgressions: Extension and Commercialization of a Cultural Mode (2015): 133-145.
