Modern monsters

Karl Marx characterized capital as “a monstrous accumulation of commodities” that “vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour”. Both Emily Horton, in 21st-Century British Gothic, and Robert T. Tally Jr, in The Fiction of Dread, cite this characterization; and both note how iconic gothic monsters such as Dracula and Frankenstein’s creature have morphed into new vampiric and zombified forms in recent horror fiction. “In the era of globalization”, Tally remarks, “both the monstrosity and the accumulation expand exponentially, inaugurating a dystopian era of monsters.”

Horton’s book focuses on manifestations of the gothic in British novels and short fiction published over the past twenty-four years. While the gothic, as the author reminds us, has always been political, its metamorphoses in the 2020s demonstrate the genre’s “central importance as a contemporary mode of sociopolitical critique”. Hence the evolution traced from “Post-9/11 Gothic”, in Pat Barker’s trauma-shadowed Double Vision (2003) and Patrick McGrath’s triptych of novellas about American history, Ghost Town (2005), to “Pandemic Gothic”, in the viruses, clones and contamination fears in the writings of Kazuo Ishiguro and M. R. Carey, and finally “Wet Gothic”, in the female vampires, changelings and sea creatures of Daisy Johnson’s uncanny collection Fen (2016), Zoe Gilbert’s atmospheric, island-set Folk (2018) and Julia Armfield’s oceanic horror Our Wives Under the Sea (2022).

Horton’s chapter “Decolonial Gothic”, meanwhile, explores stories centring on South Asian, Middle Eastern, Arab and Muslim communities that have served as the “focal point of Western threat narratives” following 9/11. (Horton analyses skilfully Tash Aw’s novel The Harmony Silk Factory, 2005, which takes place in British-ruled Malaysia in the 1940s, and Nadeem Aslam’s portrait of contemporary Afghanistan, The Wasted Vigil, 2008.) British fiction’s gothic literary heritage and the country’s colonial past converge powerfully in Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is for Witching (2009). Set in Dover in the 2000s, this vampire tale overturns Bram Stoker’s Dracula to address questions of racism and xenophobia through the actions of its malevolent sentient guest house. When it comes to “Brexit Gothic”, Horton connects Dracula to Nigel Farage’s “draw[ing] on canonical Gothic discourses” in order to demonize Romanian immigrants.

In The Fiction of Dread, Tally describes the rise in dystopian narratives in popular culture over the past few decades. Presented as a “sort of sequel” to the same author’s Utopia in the Age of Globalization (2013), the book investigates “what appears to be an almost epochal shift from a dominant utopianism to a pervasive dystopianism in postmodernity”, linking this to current global anxieties and uncertainties: “it is not just that there seems to be an unlimited reservoir of ‘monsters’ with which to menace us with in our present moment, but that the accumulation of dreadful things seems to proceed at an alarming rate”.

Tally begins with a historical survey of a century of dystopian fiction, starting with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We (1921) and taking in the genre’s bifurcation into “soma versus surveillance”: the hedonistic failed utopia, as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and the totalitarian regime, as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Moving into the uneasy optimism of the post-Cold War period, Tally sets Neil Gaiman’s dark fantasy travelogue American Gods (2001) against the backdrop of the fluid free trade promised by Nafta. With its supernatural underworld of immigrant gods, Gaiman’s book dramatizes anxieties in the US, Tally suggests, about what else might slip into a post-Nafta “borderless world” alongside more convenient goods and services.

This study is perhaps at its most energized when it comes to monsters in modern form; it takes readers on a spirited tour through the real and metaphorical bogeymen of the past forty years. Surveying the evil clowns of Reagan-era horror movies and novels such as Stephen King’s It, Tally remarks that “a monstrous, otherworldly predator adopting the physical form of a ‘dancing clown’ might be a bit too on the nose” for an era governed by a seemingly “harmless, likeable entertainer”. More recently, he suggests, the zombie apocalypses of the Korean contagion thriller Train to Busan (2016) and HBO’s pandemic-set The Last of Us (2023) depict the zombified undead as the proletariat opposite of the vampiric capitalist classes on a globalized scale. “These traditional monsters may take on new forms, and yet their messages remain as urgent as ever.”

Elizabeth Dearnley is a folklorist, writer and artist based in Edinburgh. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Edinburgh Napier University, and her most recent book is Deadly Dolls: Midnight tales of uncanny playthings, 2024

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