Fear and Nature

“Fear and Nature expansively defines eco-horror as not only a sub-genre of literature but as a cohesive mode operating across genres and media. Whether talking about Algernon Blackwood or Algernon Swinburne, Bong Joon Ho or Junji Ito, this volume explores the rhizomatic connections that make eco-criticism something that transcends genre, and makes a convincing case for its relevance not only today but as a way of reconsidering what has come before.”—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World

“Fear and Nature straddles popular culture studies, horror and gothic studies, film and literary studies, and cultural studies. It is an expansive, ambitious, and exploratory book that is working to move the field beyond earlier works of ecohorror criticism by considering fresh approaches to the subject.”—Bernice Murphy, author of The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture: Backwoods Horror and Terror in the Wilderness

“This foundational text is an optimistic thrust of possible reimagination, one that does not “foreclose the future or discourage activism.””—ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

“This representative and symbolic book is highly recommended to readers as it can offer them the ethics and responsibilities towards nature.”—Tohidur Rahaman, Journal of Ecohumanism

“This book is definitely going to be one of the more authoritative texts in the field for a while, due to its sharp, language-building introduction, the chapters’ wide applications of ecohorror theory, and the scholars’ tendency to use their work to open up conversations rather than simply proving a statement and walking away.”—Jonathan W. Thurston-Torres, SFRA Review

Christy Tidwell is Associate Professor of English and Humanities at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. She is the coeditor of Gender and Environment in Science Fiction.

Carter Soles is Associate Professor of Film Studies at SUNY Brockport. He has published a number of journal articles and book chapters in the fields of film studies and ecomedia.

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Ecohorror in the Anthropocene

Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles

Part 1: Expanding Horror

1. Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Trees in Algernon Blackwood’s “The Man Whom the Trees Loved” and Lorcan Finnegan’s Without Name

Dawn Keetley

2. Spiraling Inward and Outward: Junji Ito’s Uzumaki and the Scope of Ecohorror

Christy Tidwell

3. “The Hand of Deadly Decay”: The Rotting Corpse, America’s Religious Tradition, and the Ethics of Green Burial in Poe’s “The Colloquy of Monos and Una”

Ashley Kniss

Part 2: Haunted and Unhaunted Landscapes

4. The Death of Birdsong, the Birdsong of Death: Algernon Charles Swinburne and the Horror of Erosion

Keri Stevenson

5. An Unhaunted Landscape: The Anti-Gothic Impulse in Ambrose Bierce’s “A Tough Tussle”

Chelsea Davis

6. The Extinction-Haunted Salton Sea in The Monster That Challenged the World

Bridgitte Barclay

Part 3: The Ecohorror of Intimacy

7. From the Bedroom to the Bathroom: Stephen King’s Scatology and the Emergence of an Urban Environmental Gothic

Marisol Cortez

8. “This Bird Made an Art of Being Vile”: Ontological Difference and Uncomfortable Intimacies in Stephen Gregory’s The Cormorant

Brittany R. Roberts

9. The Shape of Water and Post-pastoral Ecohorror

Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann

Part 4: Being Prey, Being Food

10. Superpig Blues: Agribusiness Ecohorror in Bong Joon-ho’s Okja

Kristen Angierski

11. Zoo: Television Ecohorror On and Off the Screen

Sharon Sharp

12. Naturalizing White Supremacy in The Shallows

Carter Soles

Contributors

Index

Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction

Literary Studies