Body Gothic

Since the mainstreaming of horror in the 1970s, journalists have warned against the dangers of increasingly explicit forms of violent entertainment. Xavier Aldana Reyes takes a very different stance in Body Gothic by celebrating the transgressive qualities of visceral texts. He considers relevant popular literary and filmic movements of the past three decades and reads them as updates in a long Gothic tradition that goes back to the eighteenth century. The book contains case studies of key texts in splatterpunk, body horror, the new avant-pulp, the slaughterhouse novel, torture porn and surgical horror.