Postmodern Gothic

Abstract

While the writers interviewed and discussed here—Charles Beaumont, Stephen King, Peter Straub, Suzie McKee Charnas, T. E. D. Kline, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Brian Aldiss, Philip Jose Farmer, Alan Moore, and William Gibson—continue to rely to an extent on haunted places, guilty secrets, paranoia, mad scientists, ghosts, and vampires, they also translate them into contemporary anxieties over the dissolving boundaries between gender and race, society and nature, biology and technology, transgressive sexualities, class fluidities, factual history and historical alternatives, and human evolution and devolution. We will see, as Chris Barker observes in Making Sense of Cultural Studies, how in these writings “the decentered or postmodern self involves the subject in shifting, fragmented, and multiple identities” (12–52).