Dark Chocolate from the Literary Crypt: Teaching Contemporary Gothic Horror

Abstract

As a genre, Gothic horror has never been more popular on the university syllabus, yet, because it is often seen as low brow, popular culture, distasteful schlock, horror hides behind the ‘Gothic’, its more respectable half, or behind speculative fiction, or period studies.¹ Gothic horror appears in the work of many classic and contemporary writers. It is ubiquitous, a form of choice to deal with everything from concerns with identity, poverty and violence to cultural and gendered difference. This chapter will argue that teaching Gothic horror enables academics and students to co-construct culturally inflected understandings through engaging with literary and media representations of those issues that matter in life such as identity, domestic securities, sexuality, race, the family, culture, the body, equality, sustainability, the future. The main examples drawn upon from my own teaching practice are Bram Stoker’s highly influential Dracula (1897) and, more extensively, the Gothic horror of twenty-first-century writer Neil Gaiman. While Stoker’s nineteenth century canonical text raises issues of cultural and psychological responses to terrors concerning sexuality, race, migration and Otherness, Gaiman’s post-millennial works deal with similar issues but do so through referencing another horror master, H. P. Lovecraft, splicing horror with the comic. In so doing, his twenty-first century work creates teaching and learning opportunities to use the digital to co-construct knowledge through research, popular cultural references, and a seemingly ‘live’ interaction with the author and his own comic Gothic horror writing processes.