Blackwood's Canadian stories offer a version of Gothic wilderness-tourism terror, informed by an inherent ambivalence and repressed guilt about the British ‘colonizer’ entering traditional Indigenous territory. The encounter with Indigenous peoples and cultures, even as these cultures are recognized as more holistic and authentic than rational British subjects, is marked by a distinct discomfort. The British tourists, for all that they want to become one with nature, experience themselves encompassed by a hostile natural environment in which they are aware of themselves as intruders. Indigenous cultures in these stories are either threatening spectres (‘The Valley of the Beasts’; ‘The Haunted Island’; ‘The Wendigo’) or forlorn remnants (‘Running Wolf’), in both instances highlighting the irrepressible guilt that stalks the white intruder who unconsciously courts an experience of self-dissolution as expiation. If the repressed content in these stories is the fact of colonization, entering the territory as a foreign element, an invader, represents a form of uncanny intrusion through which the disowned past returns. However, in Blackwood's stories, the characters seek out this memory of disownment. As a form of colonial expiation, Blackwood's Canadian gothics enact the process identified by Renée Bergland in The National Uncanny, whereby Indigenous ghosts (and monsters) are internalized within the colonizer's imagination as spectres of both guilt and desire.

Processes of becoming, of transformation or transmutation, are central to Algernon Blackwood’s ghostly weird fiction. In the vast majority of his short stories, everyday people, places, and events are rendered potential entryways to other forms of life and consciousness – portals to ‘elsewhere and otherwise’, as he liked to put it. Across his fiction, he explores the possibilities and enmeshments of human and nonhuman psyches, and the rapturous dialectic of joy and terror that follows when the bounded human subject comes undone. Using stories such as ‘A Descent Into Egypt’, ‘The Wings of Horus’, and ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ as case studies, this article argues that Blackwood achieves these enmeshments through a Gothic feeling-with – a ‘dark empathy’. This dark empathy accommodates and gives shape to a dis-anthropomorphic aesthetics, one that is ultimately better suited to the entanglements between the physical and the nonphysical that characterise his fiction.

Conceiving all the world's phenomena as ‘natural’, Blackwood constructed haunting entities using innovative unions of mind, spirit, force, and matter, locating them in mimetic storyworlds drawn from his own travels and experiences, including skiing and mountaineering. In ‘The Glamour of the Snow’, conflict between the modern world of Alpine ski tourism and the ancient powers of elemental winter produces a seductive, ghostly snow-being who lures the imaginatively-sensitive protagonist nearly to his death on a night-time ski trip in the high mountains of the Valais. This sport, which enabled skiers to experience the winter Alps in new ways, sprang from the same rapidly developing modernity putting mountain environments under pressure. Blackwood's story uses the agencies of snow and skis to explore the possibilities of new understandings between the human world and the natural world, as well as the dangers inherent in the encounter.

This article offers a reading of Corpos secos [ Dried Bodies], a novel published in March 2020, just as the COVID pandemic was starting to spread all over the world. Written jointly by four authors, it tells of a lethal disease that devastates Brazil, transforming it into an apocalyptic land. Rather than killing the larvae in the plantations, untested new pesticides have fed them, causing an outbreak of disease that infects almost the entire population. The infected become known as ‘dried bodies’, ghostlike and bloodthirsty figures that haunt the country terrorizing people, while a few survivors roam in search of a safe place. The stories of four of them alternate to recount their struggle to remain alive in face of impending danger and constant threat. With this novel at its centre, this article engages with Justin Edwards’s work on ecological crisis, climate change, and the destructive potency of the capitalist world-system. The article shows how the Gothic tradition aids the novel’s strategy to deal with pressing issues like the indiscriminate use of chemicals, ecological disaster, and the destructive power of capitalism.

This article charts the cultural connections between the vampire and the volcano as gothic symbols. Covering the period between the eighteenth century – when increased volcanic activity on Etna and Vesuvius as well as the excavations at Pompeii sparked a cultural fascination with volcanos – and the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which originally featured a sensational volcanic ending, I argue that the volcano and the vampire become culturally interconnected and share much of the same symbolic coding and signifying power. Both threaten social orders and even civilizations through the destruction of human bodies, relationships, and property. Both are portals in time – sites where ancient horrors might be spewed forth to menace the present. And both produce uncannily petrified people, from the undead body of the vampire to the human remains from Pompeii. This article makes the case for the volcano as an important and previously overlooked gothic symbol, and for a Volcanic Gothic as a mode through which writers could articulate cultural fears.

In this introduction to the special issue, the editors read Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) and its circuitous afterlives through the lens of recent, revised critical understandings of globalgothic. Driven by its striking depiction of evil, its eccentric narrative structure, and its atmospheric intensity, Melmoth the Wanderer's cultural impact reverberated across nineteenth- and twentieth-century literatures and visual media, an influence which continues to evolve to this day. Significantly, for a text preoccupied with the problematics of translation, transcription, and transliteration, Melmoth's network of global influence is fraught with anomalies and complications. From its first appearance in nineteenth-century Russia in French translation to its rediscovery in twentieth-century Latin America, the global afterlives of Melmoth expose the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of transnational textuality, both in Maturin's era and our own. The introduction ends with an overview of the essays collected in this volume – the first scholarly study dedicated to tracing the many afterlives of Maturin's Melmoth.