This paper was originally presented at the 2024 International Gothic Association conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is republished here in slightly modified form.
This paper is a small part of a larger project on salvage. It is also an attempt at an approach and presentation style that still don’t feel like they are mine. I tried to write a paper about body horror and architectural salvage writing, and failed. This paper is haunted by something, and I don’t know how to exorcise it. As Avery F. Gordon writes in her book on haunting and the sociological imagination, “ghostly things kept cropping up and messing up other tasks I was trying to accomplish” (p. 8).
Instead, and in an attempt to stay true to the creative-critical methods I promised in my abstract, I’m going to share a few Gothic meditations on the things this failure to write what I set out to write produced, or what I have learnt about salvage and haunting through this failure. It is an experiment with salvaging that work, or with exorcising it. This paper is about architectural salvage. But it is also about salvage on a more personal level.
Happy spooky month! To celebrate the season and the paperback edition of Gothic Remixed, I’ve made a playlist of 21 songs that mash up or remix Gothic literature in different ways, available on 
Are you interested in the politics of contagious bodies and their representation in contemporary culture? Join us for a free roundtable discussion on Wednesday, 14 July 2021, from 4:00-5:30pm BST.
A few weeks ago I posted about the 
The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies has 
I’ve been sitting on this review of Leila Taylor’s Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul for almost a year. It’s not difficult to summarise my feelings—Darkly is a brilliant book. I’ve mainly been unsure how to do it proper justice. Darkly is everything I love about the Gothic as a mode: it contains multitudes. As Taylor writes, ‘Goth alone is too big, too broad’ (20) to capture, and likewise ‘Black contains multitudes…literally. As a pigment it is all colors at once, but black is also the complete absence of all light. Black is […]everything and nothing at the same time’ (83). There are many ways to be a Goth, and to be a Black Goth.
Over the past year I’ve been slowly working on a chapter for a new edited collection, Gothic Mash-Ups: Hybridity, Appropriation, and Intertextuality in Gothic Storytelling, and I’m pleased to announce that both chapter and book are now finally confirmed! Adapted from the CfP: