‘A Weapon in the Cracks’: Wasteways Between Worlds in the New Urban Gothic

Abstract

Looking at the underside of the city, Sabo explores the material filth, refuse and decaying matter that every city produces. He traces the dynamics of street rubbish in millennial Gothic fictions to suggest that we ignore trash and residue in the Anthropocene at our peril. Placing the texts in a larger context of impending ecological disaster, Sabo examines the Gothic irruptive potential of trash to deconstruct uncanny horrors and the urgent materiality of waste as expressions of one-way anxieties of filth in contemporary cityscapes. In particular, he looks to the dynamics of street rubbish in China Miéville’s The City and the City (2009) and the transcendence of discarded material objects in David Mitchell’s Slade House (2015) to map the wasteways between Gothic worlds and tropes. Sabo argues that the pressing threat of ecological disaster related to the accumulation of waste limits the new urban Gothic’s ability—or even willingness—to craft ontological oppositions that are easily extricable from the materiality of contemporary ecology.