Abstract
This chapter examines Gothic fiction’s engagement with traditional narratives of the Devil. It reads the proliferation of Satan-figures in contemporary Gothic as instances of both the re-enchantment of contemporary culture and the liquidation of religion. In novels by Glen Duncan and Chuck Palahniuk, Satan is employed as a perspective from which to satirise a late-capitalist culture of simulation and hyper-consumption of which Satan himself becomes part. Yet Gothic writers continue to employ Satan in other roles: as a voice of radical protest against the divine in Joe Hill’s Horns, or as a representation of a rural way of life rooted in community and tradition in Andrew Michael Hurley’s Devil’s Day.
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Notes
- 1.
Robert Muchembled, A History of the Devil from the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. by Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), p. 162.
- 2.
Richard Hand, Listen in Terror: British Horror Radio from the Advent of Broadcasting to the Digital Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), pp. 108–9.
- 3.
Henry Ansgar Kelly, Satan: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 2.
- 4.
See Owen Davies, Witchcraft, Magic and Culture, 1736–1951 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999).
- 5.
Glen Duncan, I, Lucifer (London: Scribner, 2003), p. 3. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation IL.
- 6.
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994), p. 6.
- 7.
Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, p. 1.
- 8.
Linnie Blake and Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, ‘Introduction: Neoliberal Gothic’, in Blake and Monnet (eds.), Neoliberal Gothic: International Gothic in the Neoliberal Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 1–18 (p. 1).
- 9.
Eduardo Mendieta, ‘Surviving American Culture: On Chuck Palahniuk’, Philosophy and Literature 29.2 (October 2005), pp. 394–408 (p. 394).
- 10.
Chuck Palahniuk, Damned (London: Vintage, 2012), p. 17. Further references are given parenthetically.
- 11.
Justin Garrison, ‘“God’s Middle Children”: Metaphysical Rebellion in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club’, Humanitas 25.1–2 (2012), pp. 79–106 (p. 81).
- 12.
Chuck Palahniuk, Doomed (London: Jonathan Cape, 2013), p. 208. Further references are given parenthetically.
- 13.
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), pp. 148–9.
- 14.
J. C. Lee, ‘Contemporary US-American Satire and Consumerism (Crews, Coupland, Palahniuk)’, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14.4 (2012), http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol14/iss4/6 (p. 2 of 10).
- 15.
Lee, ‘Contemporary US-American Satire and Consumerism’, p. 9 of 10.
- 16.
McCord Adams, Christ and Horrors, pp. 35–6.
- 17.
Philip C. Almond, The Devil: A New Biography (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2016), p. 221.
- 18.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 14.
- 19.
Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 15.
- 20.
Olivia Burgess, ‘Revolutionary Bodies in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club’, Utopian Studies 23.1 (2012), pp. 263–80 (p. 270).
- 21.
Fred Botting, Limits of Horror: Technology, Bodies, Gothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 215.
- 22.
Ward, True Religion, p. 138.
- 23.
Baudrillard, Simulation and Simulacra, pp. 6–7.
- 24.
Baudrillard, Simulation and Simulacra, p. 2.
- 25.
Almond, The Devil, p. 221.
- 26.
Rachel Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature: Western Descent Narratives Since 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), p. 16.
- 27.
Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature, p. 14.
- 28.
Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature, p. 14.
- 29.
Falconer, Hell in Contemporary Literature, p. 17.
- 30.
Joe Hill, Horns (London: Gollancz, 2011), p. 5. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation H.
- 31.
Kelly, Satan, p. 323.
- 32.
Almond, The Devil, p. 47.
- 33.
Rowan Williams, Resurrection (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982), p. 89.
- 34.
Ward, True Religion, pp. viii–ix.
- 35.
Almond, The Devil, p. xiv.
- 36.
See Tom J. Hillard, ‘From Salem Witch to Blair Witch: The Puritan Influence on American Gothic Nature’, in Andrew Smith and William Hughes (eds.), Ecogothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 103–19.
- 37.
Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness (London: Vintage, 2012).
- 38.
Andrew Michael Hurley, Devil’s Day (London: John Murray, 2017), p. 167. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation DD.
- 39.
Philip C. Almond, The Lancashire Witches: A Chronicle of Sorcery and Death on Pendle Hill (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012), p. 7.
- 40.
See Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971).
- 41.
Kirsteen Macpherson Bardell, ‘Beyond Pendle: The “Lost” Lancashire Witches’, in Robert Poole (ed.), The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 105–22 (p. 107).
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Hurley, Andrew Michael. 2014. The Loney. London: John Murray.
———. 2017. Devil’s Day. London: John Murray.
———. 2013. Doomed. London: Jonathan Cape.
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Marsden, S. (2018). Sympathy for the Devil: Gothic Goes to Hell. In: The Theological Turn in Contemporary Gothic Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96571-0_7
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