Critical geosophies: A pyschotopological reading of Rice’s vampires and Romero’s zombies

Abstract

Anne Rice and George Romero are two of the foremost transformative authors of vampire and zombie fiction in the United States. This reading of their work applies a psychotopological lens to the first two novels of Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and the first three films of Romero’s Living Dead series. It differs from numerous preceding analyses of monster fiction mostly in the theoretical apparatus it articulates to link the psychic fear vampires and zombies evoke with the topologies of space and power they evince. This intervention invokes a negative understanding of dialectical materialism to analyze human-monster thresholds as political sites. It builds this theorization primarily from the works of Slavoj Žižek, Sara Ahmed, Julia Kristeva, Kojin Karatani, and to a lesser extent Joan Copjec. The result is a psychotopological analysis that challenges understandings of the monster as either timeless allegories for the systemic order or as endlessly interpretive contingencies. It also reads the topological forms of Rice’s vampires and Romero’s zombies in relation to each other. Understanding psychic space and topologies of power as integral to each other helps read the vampire and the zombie as myths which endure because of the fears of class exploitation and social collectivism they stoke.