www.gothicnaturejournal.com Gothic Nature New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic Issue One Founded by Elizabeth Parker Edited by Elizabeth Parker and Michelle Poland www.gothicnaturejournal.com Gothic Nature **We are proud to be part of the open access movement, but ask that you credit the journal and its authors in full when using this material.** Gothic Nature issue 1 How to Cite Individual Articles: Surname, Initial. (2019) Title of Essay. Gothic Nature. 1, page numbers. Available from: https://gothicnaturejournal.com/. Published: 14 September 2019 Peer Review: All articles that appear in the Gothic Nature journal have been peer reviewed through a double-blind process. Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s). This is an open-access journal distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Open Access: Gothic Nature is a peer-reviewed open access journal. www.gothicnaturejournal.com About this Journal Gothic Nature is a new peer-reviewed and open-access academic journal seeking to explore the latest evolutions of thought in the areas of ecohorror and the ecoGothic. It welcomes articles, reviews, interviews, and original creative pieces interrogating the darker sides of our relationship with the nonhuman from new and more revered scholars working at the intersection of ecocriticism, Gothic and horror studies, and the wider environmental humanities. Online and Open Access Gothic Nature is available online at https://gothicnaturejournal.com/, where you can easily access all articles, reviews, blogs, and other materials for free. We are proud to be a part of an international movement making research freely available to the public in the pursuit of a greater global exchange of knowledge. Also visit the GN website for more information about the journal, including contact details for the Editors and submission guidelines. Founding Editor Elizabeth Parker Editors Elizabeth Parker and Michelle Poland Book Review Editor Jennifer Schell TV and Film Review Editor Sara L. Crosby Editorial Board: Stacy Alaimo Eric G. Anderson Scott Brewster Rachele Dini Simon C. Estok Tom J. Hillard William Hughes Dawn Keetley Ian Kinane John Miller Matthew Wynn Sivils Andrew Smith Samantha Walton www.gothicnaturejournal.com Acknowledgements It takes an enormous amount of work to get a journal like this off the ground. We say this not to credit ourselves, but rather to credit the many, many people who have helped to make this possible. As two Early Career Researchers, we’re hugely grateful for the support of established academics who have so generously shared their expertise and enthusiasm for this project. We’re honoured to have some of the foremost leading names in the fields of ecohorror, ecoGothic, Gothic Studies, and the environmental humanities on our Editorial Board and contributing essays to this first issue. We have been extremely fortunate with the dedication and talent of all our contributors, whose hard work and fervour have created the pages below. Special thanks must also be given to James Smith, who has helped advise on so many practical issues with publication, to Scott Brewster for kindly overseeing our introduction, and to Ian Kinane for his unwavering support throughout the editorial process. Most especially, we wish to thank Michael Belcher, who has made this open-access journal possible by so generously devoting his time to the creation and running of this beautiful website. www.gothicnaturejournal.com Gothic Nature Issue One • September 2019 Contents Gothic Nature: An Introduction 1 Elizabeth Parker and Michelle Poland ARTICLES Gothic Nature Revisited: Reflections on the Gothic of Ecocriticism 21 Tom J. Hillard Theorising the EcoGothic 34 Simon C. Estok ‘Don’t be a Zombie’: Deep Ecology and Zombie Misanthropy 54 Kevin Corstorphine Children of the Quorn: The Vegetarian, Raw, and the Horrors of Vegetarianism 78 Jimmy Packham ‘A Stern, a Sad, a Darkly Meditative, a Distrustful, if not a Desperate Man, 103 Did He Become, from the Night of that Fearful Dream’: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Nocturnal Gothic Sarah Cullen ‘On the Border Territory Between the Animal and the Vegetable 127 Kingdoms’: Plant-Animal Hybridity and the Late Victorian Imagination Marc Ricard EcoGothic, Ecohorror and Apocalyptic Entanglement in Alan Moore 155 and Dave Gibbons’ Tales of the Black Freighter James L. Smith and Colin Yeo The Value(s) of Landscape: The Sublime, the Picturesque, and Ann Radcliffe 177 Garland D. Beasley ‘Monkey-Advice and Monkey-Help’: Isak Dinesen’s EcoGothic 202 Peter Mortensen www.gothicnaturejournal.com BOOK REVIEWS CRITICAL Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils (eds.) Ecogothic in 226 Nineteenth-Century American Literature (London: Routledge, 2018) Elizabeth Parker Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything 230 (London: Penguin Books, 2018) Marlee Fuhrmann Timothy Morton, Being Ecological 233 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018) Eric Heyne Adam Scovell, Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange 236 (New York: Auteur, 2017) Ken Duffy Lee Gambin, Nope, Nothing Wrong Here: The Making of Cujo 239 (Albany, GA: BearManor Media, 2017) Daniel Otto Jack Petersen Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt (eds.) 242 Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Monsters/Ghosts of the Anthropocene (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) Alyssa Quintanilla Simon C. Estok, The Ecophobia Hypothesis 246 (London: Routledge, 2018) Rick Hudson FICTION Cherie Dimaline, The Marrow Thieves 249 (Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2017) Jennifer Schell Mike Ashley, ed., From the Depths and Other Strange Tales of the Sea 253 (London: British Library Publishing, 2019) Michael Wheatley www.gothicnaturejournal.com TV AND FILM REVIEWS Annihilation: A Roundtable Review 256 (USA: Skydance Media, 2018) Sara L. Crosby, Andrew Hageman, Shannon Davies Mancus, Daniel Platt, and Alison Sperling The Rain 282 (Denmark: Netflix, 2018) Rebecca Gibson Caged by Frail and Fragile Bonds: A Review of Michael Pearce’s Beast 285 (UK: Agile Films, Stray Bear Productions, 2017) Isaac Rooks Plumbing the Depths: Ozark as Rural Gothic 288 (USA: Media Rights Capital, 2017) Amanda Hagood Muscles and Spells: Violent Transcendence in AMC’s The Terror 292 (USA: AMC, 2018) Ian Green Girl Meets Shark: From The Shallows (2016) and 295 47 Meters Down (2017) to The Meg (2018) Karen J. Renner Siren Sisters: Feminist Mermaid Ecohorror 300 in Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s The Lure (2017) (Poland: WFDiF, 2015) Kristen Angierski ‘We’re not the only animals in the woods’: The Ritual (2017) 304 (UK: The Imaginarium, 2017) Caitlin Duffy A Libertarian’s House Cannot Stand: Trey Edward Shults, It Comes at Night 310 (USA: A24, 2017) Khara Lukancic Reviewer Biographies 314 INTERVIEWS Forest 404: Interview with writer Timothy X Atack 321 Interview by Elizabeth Parker www.gothicnaturejournal.com Gothic Nature: An Introduction Elizabeth Parker and Michelle Poland A tale of two Gothic Natures: One: You are lost in a wood. Now survive. Two: The planet you think you live on no longer exists. Now survive. As we write this introduction to the inaugural issue of Gothic Nature, thousands of fires are ravaging the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. These fires are pumping alarming quantities of carbon into the Earth’s atmosphere and devastating the world’s biggest terrestrial carbon sink: an irreplaceably important home for biodiversity. According to media reports, the major cause of these fires is agricultural – human-made and, in some cases, deliberate. The causes and consequences associated with large-scale deforestation are by now well-known and it is common knowledge that ‘wild’ spaces are rapidly disappearing. Nonetheless, despite the ostensibly dwindling relevance of the wilderness to our everyday and increasingly urban lives, fears of the nonhuman world are as rampant as ever. The very thought of being alone in these wild, more-than-human spaces still provokes a sense of unease for reasons that go beyond simple physical safety. In the cultural imagination, Nature has always engendered fear, wonder, and fascination. Tale One, above, is a classic if concise example of how Gothic writers engage with our imagined fears of the nonhuman world: Nature is consistently constructed in our stories as Other, excessive, unpredictable, disruptive, chaotic, enticing, supernaturally powerful, and, perhaps most disturbingly, alive. It importantly threatens our very definitions of ‘humanness’. Tale Two, meanwhile, indicates something far more sinister and unsettling: from climate crisis and collapsing permafrost to mass extinction and microplastics inhabiting our bodies, Gothic depictions of Nature seem to have slipped, uninvited, into reality while we were busy making other plans. This journal aims to explore these two Gothic Natures critically and creatively – that is, the Nature in Gothic and the Gothic in Nature. Open access and peer- reviewed, Gothic Nature provides a timely scholarly forum for established and emerging scholars alike to investigate both perennial fears of the nonhuman world and new fears about its degradation, disappearance, and mutation. 1 www.gothicnaturejournal.com It should be noted from the outset that in this introduction, in which we introduce the idea of ‘Gothic Nature’, we use the term ‘Gothic’ in its broadest sense. This is to say that we intend the term here, which