In their introduction to Haunting Realities: Naturalist Gothic and American Realism, Monika Elbert and Wendy Ryden reflect that Edith Wharton is the ideal subject for the collection's concluding chapter, for she represents authors who “resist easy classification” (11). Wharton's blurring of canonical boundaries has long worried Wharton scholars, leading to arguments that merely scatter Wharton's fiction into various genres and literary movements. Elbert and Ryden resist such contestations, expressing little concern in distinguishing naturalism, the gothic, or a fusion of the two, as either genre or mode. Instead, they show how realist writers use particular language to reckon with the shortcomings of the Progressive Era and the by-products of consumer capitalism. They do so by troubling the divide between romanticism and realism, prefacing that “while Realism strives to distinguish itself from vacuous sentimentality and excessive feeling of the Romantic Gothic, Naturalism reinvigorates the Realist impulse through a Gothic conception that anticipates even as it forestalls the nihilism of literary Modernism” (4). Rather than propose the “Naturalist Gothic” as a new hybrid of genre categorization, Elbert and Ryden suggest that, by locating the gothic within naturalist texts, readers can better understand the ways in which the romantic “struggle to break free of the past” (8) permeates the present in realist texts.The collection's seventeen chapters are thematically organized into five sections, which address common elements of the gothic: ghostly spaces, deteriorating settings, and mysterious manifestations of the supernatural. Throughout each section, it is difficult to pin down a singular conception of the “Naturalist Gothic.” Some essays read texts holistically as either works of “Gothic Naturalism” or the “Naturalist Gothic,” while others separate authorial strategies of naturalism from those of the gothic. Despite these inconsistencies, the essays work together to show how scientific, naturalist renderings of modernity's many monstrosities can be better understood through a gothic lens. Therefore, the collection gives literary scholars a new understanding of how realist writers confront issues of the modern age, illuminating new connections between American literary romanticism, realism, and modernism.The first section, “Imprisoning Genders,” locates the gothic within naturalist texts to reveal how social conceptions of gender and race can manifest as horrors of modernity. The opening chapter by Stephen Arch discusses Elizabeth Stoddard's The Morgesons (1862), arguing that the gothic mode enables Stoddard to distinguish between oppressive domestic space and the liberating power of the interior self. In the second chapter, Wendy Ryden suggests that, in Charles Chesnutt's “The Wife of His Youth” (1898), a Naturalist Gothic portrait of the slave union highlights the racial implications of institutionalized marriage. The third and fourth essays, by David Greven and Donna M. Campbell, evince the most extensive naturalist readings of the collection. Analyzing Stephen Crane's The Monster (1898), Greven reads the protagonist's monstrous transformation as “an allegory of sexual consumerism funneled by both male and female desires and organized around the black male body” (53). Continuing the theme of bodily consumption, Campbell argues that Elizabeth Robins's My Little Sister (1913) and Frank Norris's “The Third Circle” (1909) problematize social trends that blamed foreigners for the sex trafficking of white, female bodies. As a whole, the volume's first section advocates for the centrality of gothic detail in depictions of marriage, domesticity, and sexual and racial identity in naturalist works.The second section, “Horrors of the Civil War and Its Aftermath,” traces the development of gothic inflections of naturalism through literary representations of the Civil War and its traumatic wake. In the fifth chapter, Monika Elbert situates the domestic gothic of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar (1868) and Ambrose Bierce's Civil War stories (1889–1908) within the context of postwar trauma and the Spiritualist movement. The subsequent chapter, by Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet, continues Greven's discussion of Crane's monstrous transformations. While both essays evince Crane's gothic treatment of naturalism's unstable social order, Monnet adds that Crane does so to advocate for stronger militaristic control in the modern age. In the section's last essay, Steve Marsden reads Paul Lawrence Dunbar's “The Lynching of Jube Benson” (1904) as a “club tale story of haunting” (105), a narrative framework best exemplified by Thomas Nelson Page's “The Spectre in the Cart” (1899). According to Marsden, Dunbar's story subverts the “Gothic racial mythology” (111) of Page's plantation fiction, which characterized African Americans as either dangerously bestial or obsequiously infantile. Jointly, the volume's first two sections provide an overview of realism's reconfiguration of romantic devices, in which naturalism's vivid horrors are characterized by gothic features.The essays that make up the middle section, “Wicked Money, Haunted Objects,” are particularly helpful to Wharton scholars, for they explore Naturalist Gothic treatments of material culture and the inseparability of the home from the marketplace. The section begins with Dara Downey's essay, which associates Wharton with women writers, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Mary E. Wilkins, who use the gothic to illustrate “the fraught relationship between middle-class women in fin-de-siècle America and the spaces they inhabit” (120). Next, Christine A. Wooley notes that the authors in her analysis, Pauline Hopkins and W. E. B. Du Bois, share with Wharton an engagement in the American gothic, which “often presents the past as an unrelenting force that intrudes upon the present” (144). The third essay, by Patricia Luedecke, pairs themes of gambling and eviction in Theodore Dreiser's The Financier (1912) to emphasize the entanglements of the home within the marketplace. Luedecke references Wharton's Lily Bart as a prime example in her enumeration of turn-of-the-century narratives that thematize “homelessness and eviction at all social strata” (155). Although these essays reference Wharton only briefly, they highlight concerns Wharton shared with her contemporaries about the power of the past to dictate and destabilize social and economic conditions.The fourth section, “Paranormal Longings and Warnings,” deviates slightly from the collection's focus on the Naturalist Gothic elements of realism, as its essays are primarily biographical. Dennis Berthold opens the section with a demonstration of how gothic literature influenced Alice Cary's stories of life on the Ohio frontier. Lisa A. Long follows with a correlation between Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's life events and The Gate's Between (1887), documenting the ghostly results of the violent intersection between matrimony and medicine. Thirdly, Daniel Mrozowski recounts Hamlin Garland's lifelong desire to lend scientific validity to the Spiritualist movement. Despite its heavy biographical content, the fourth section ultimately supports the collection's objective through its identification of an important literary paradox, in which the lexicon of scientific naturalism is used to document gothic formulations of the supernatural.The fifth and final section, “Spectral Landscapes and Locations,” reverses the paradox elucidated in the previous section to discuss the works of well-known naturalist authors. Specifically, gothic settings become a space for depicting the horrifying, real-world implications of naturalism's evolutionary concepts. Tracing the gothic motifs of doubling and vampirism in Davis's neglected story “The Second Life” (1863), Alicia Mischa Renfroe associates Darwinian sexual selection with “both the imperiled heroine of the Gothic tradition and the female body as spectacle associated with Naturalism” (211). Next, Charlotte L. Quinney connects Norris's McTeague (1899) to California's late nineteenth-century art culture, which popularized nocturnal imagery. Quinney correlates this influence with the gothic trope of darkness to discuss a naturalist devolution in the novel. Quinney introduces the “ecoGothic,” which she defines as the “dismantling of the binary between the human and natural worlds” (231). The following essay, by Kenneth K. Brandt, considers the concept more fully, as Brandt focuses on Jack London's depiction of “human–nonhuman animal relationships” (238). He claims that London uses the “ecoGothic” to deal with issues of social evolution. Collectively, these three chapters draw attention to the ways naturalist characterizations and themes are often situated within gothic settings of darkness and decay.The volume concludes with Gary Totten's analysis of Wharton's short fiction, an essay that affirms Wharton's place in Naturalist Gothic studies. Totten asserts that “within Wharton's Naturalist aesthetic, the Gothic allows her to present a range of female agency at work in a variety of women's experiences lying between human struggle and deterministic despair” (249). This dialectic, as Totten explains, “suggests the cultural importance of the Gothic in representing the ethical and humanistic dimensions of American Naturalism” (252). Totten elaborates on the ways, only peripherally discussed in the third section's essays, that Wharton uses the Naturalist Gothic to deal with a range of turn-of-the-century cultural anxieties, such as urban degeneracy, destabilized class identity, and women's displacement in the modern world.In all, Haunting Realities illuminates the Naturalist Gothic mutations of romantic conventions within realist literature. The collection astutely attends to issues of race, gender, imprisonment, and consumption—a critical effort that calls attention to the vitality of women and African American writers within the Naturalist Gothic canon. While the biographical content of the fourth section distracts slightly from this endeavor, the collection makes clear the importance of recovering literary works not traditionally associated with the naturalist movement. Most important, it broadens the boundaries that have historically limited authors' literary affiliations. In bringing lesser-known authors together with Wharton and her fellow realists, Haunting Realities sheds light on the gothic specters long hidden away in the recesses of American literary naturalism.