Los Angeles Review of Books: Anthropocene Gothic

Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth both reclaims the gothic as an urgently relevant mode of fiction-making and suggests that aesthetic approaches are able to bring us a kind of understanding that scientific studies on their own could not.

An urgent volume of essays engages the Gothic to advance important perspectives on our geological era

Each section of the book contains a number of essays that analyze particular gothic works in order to reflect on our overall predicament. The texts discussed range from German and American novels from two centuries ago to recent horror fiction, and to television series such as True Detective and Twin Peaks. The chapters include exemplary readings of such contemporary masters of the weird as Ben Okri, Jeff VanderMeer, and Caitlín Kiernan. All of the essays connect the subjective potency of the texts under discussion — the affects and moods that they inspire in the reader or viewer — to the ways that such works also give us a deeper understanding of the ongoing ecological transactions that are putting our very existence at risk. Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth both reclaims the gothic as an urgently relevant mode of fiction-making and suggests that aesthetic approaches are able to bring us a kind of understanding that scientific studies on their own could not.

Read the full review at Los Angeles Review of Books.