The Dead Days: Epilogue

Happy New Year’s Eve! Thank you for joining us once again, at the end of the Dead Days, the end of the year. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading our posts this week, and that your own Dead Days have been pleasant (if a little uncanny). Whatever your plans for tonight, whether you stay up to … Continue reading The Dead Days: Epilogue →

The Dead Days: Life and Death

Photo by Charles Parker on Pexels.com Welcome back to the Dead Days, and to the first of our posts exploring liminality and thresholds in the Gothic. Today, we’ll be thinking about the boundary between life and death, and those who exist in-between: the eerie undead. The undead crop up over and over in the Gothic, … Continue reading The Dead Days: Life and Death →

The Haunting of Netflix Watch Parties

Our Everyday Gothic series explores day-to-day experiences that have reminded us of the Gothic – whether these were spooky, unsettling, or just a little odd. In this post, Megan Stephens talks about the ghostliness of watching a show at the same time as someone on the other side of the globe. I recently watched Netflix’s … Continue reading The Haunting of Netflix Watch Parties →

The Gothic Epidemic

Across the centuries, the social and cultural impacts of epidemics have resonated with writers. Whether concerned with the spiritual implications of these catastrophic events, as in Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), issues of individual versus collective responsibility, such as in Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947), or questions about the limitations and … Continue reading The Gothic Epidemic →

A Ghost Story For Christmas

There is probably a smell of roasted chestnuts and other good comfortable things all the time, for we are telling Winter Stories— Ghost Stories, or more shame for us—round the Christmas fire Charles Dickens, ‘A Christmas Tree’, Household Words (1850) The association between Yuletide cheer and seasonal fear emerged from the Victorian era’s appetite for … Continue reading A Ghost Story For Christmas →

A Brief Celebration of Witches

(This is a special Halloween post by Sophie Barber) There is no character we are guaranteed to see at Halloween more than the witch. A favourite fancy dress costume for children and adults alike, we have come to associate witches with the frivolity of Western Halloween celebrations. But the pointy hats and broomsticks of our modern-day witches have a rich history that has not always been so light-hearted...