Browsing by Author "Mercer E"

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    “‘This horrible patrimony’: Masculinity, War and the Upper Classes in Jessie Douglas Kerruish’s The Undying Monster.”
    (Edinburgh University Press for the International Gothic Association, 2020-11) Mercer E
    The recent reissue of Jessie Douglas Kerruish’s critically neglected Gothic novel The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension (1922) describes it as ‘dated’ but its more conservative elements nevertheless exist alongside a subversive thrust. Published just four years after the end of the First World War, the novel extols the nobility of the landed gentry, positioning protagonist Oliver Hammand as representative of a positive tradition that guarantees social order in a time of chaos, while simultaneously discrediting the upper class by depicting Oliver as an untamed beast that threatens social order. The Undying Monster has something to add to understandings of Gothic narratives that use the figure of the werewolf to explore the sinister side of masculinity, in particular the possibility that depravity might belong to the upper classes, rather than the lower class as was popularly imagined.
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    “This sense of otherness”: The Horrors of the Countryside in Andrew Michael Hurley’s Starve Acre.
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2024-02-19) Mercer E
    In novels The Loney (2014), Devil’s Day (2017) and Starve Acre (2019), contemporary British author Andrew Michael Hurley locates threat in the British countryside where primitive superstition continues to exist. Describing his writing as “folk horror,” Hurley tempers nostalgic desires for a traditional rural lifestyle by revealing its barbaric underpinnings. In his most recent novel, he also critiques contemporary values. In Starve Acre, the Willoughby family are tormented by superstitious beliefs, but they are ultimately undone by a privileging of material secular realities. Starve Acre thus represents the traditions of the rural past and those of the urban present as equally threatening. This bleak vision of British life suggests that solace is not to be found in idealized notions of an escape from contemporary living to the traditional lifestyles of the past. Rather, that the return to a life lived in harmony with the environment must be accompanied by a psychic return that acknowledges the power and fundamental otherness of nature. What Hurley’s fiction highlights is that the anti-Enlightenment project associated with Gothic’s varied manifestations, including folk horror, can be harnessed for contemporary concerns with how humanity might better exist in and relate with the natural environment.