Volume 10, Issue 1
(Fall 2024)
To buy print copy of issue:
Editors’ Note, by Leah Richards and John R. Ziegler (3-4)
In the Same Boat: Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera as Inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gollum, by Kathryn Colvin (5-32)
Abstract: Longstanding misconceptions about J.R.R. Tolkien’s reading interests, as well as a blockbuster Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, have for decades obscured a compelling and heretofore unexplored source for the character of Gollum in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings: Erik, the titular “Opera ghost” from mystery writer Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, known in English as The Phantom of the Opera. Opening with an argument for the plausibility of Tolkien having read Phantom and an overview of how Erik’s rich cultural afterlives “mask” Leroux’s original character, this article identifies and analyzes the many strikingly specific similarities between Leroux’s Erik and Tolkien’s Gollum—including the uncanny descents to their lairs, their little boats on their deadly underground lakes, their glowing eyes and corpse-like physiques, their penchants for stalking and strangling, their groveling and third-person bemoaning of their “poor” selves, and the importance to both of a gold ring—before concluding with a reading of Gollum as Phantom adaptation, uncovering Tolkien’s transformations of pity and desire: two concepts central to both The Phantom of the Opera and The Lord of the Rings which find their shared locus in Erik/Gollum.
Keywords: Gaston Leroux, J.R.R. Tolkien, The Phantom of the Opera, Gollum, influence, monstrosity
A Literary Hauntology: Channeling the Supernatural in Alan Garner’s Thursbitch, by Therese-M. Meyer (33-54)
Abstract: This article discusses Alan Garner’s novel Thursbitch (2003) by developing a decidedly literary hauntology, drawing upon Derrida’s Spectres of Marx (1993). It argues that Garner textually channels spectrality via a neo-shamanic authorial persona, by using a dual timeline narrative which employs psychogeographical characterization and animistic landscapes. The analysis focuses on the role of disjointed chronology, spectral repetition, and the haunting of readers, exploring how Garner’s work transcends mimetic representation in order to evoke an affective experience of haunting. It demonstrates that spectrality serves ethical functions, offering critiques of capitalism, institutionalized inhumanity, and environmental degradation, while invoking justice for the past and future alike. Garner’s psychogeographical framework embeds his characters within a shared history and a specifically local topography. The essay proposes that Garner’s text, through its performative neo-shamanism, allows readers to engage actively with spectral Otherness, forging a liminal space between passive-aesthetic consumption and ethical confrontation, wherein the spectral becomes both a site of imaginative empathic engagement and an appeal to transformative justice.
Keywords: literary hauntology, spectrality and ethics, psychogeography, neo-shamanism, animistic landscapes
The Spirits of Radio: Remediated Spiritualism, the Ghost Box and Paranormal Reality Television, by Lee Barron (55-83)
Abstract: This article considers the historic role of wireless telegraphic and radio technology in the context of nineteenth-century spiritualism and argues that, via the modern Spirit or Ghost Box device, radio continues to reflect this close association in the context of contemporary ghost hunting reality television shows. Through the examination of two paranormal reality television examples, Ghost Adventures and Ghosts of Devil’s Perch, the article explores the ongoing importance of radio as a channel argued to be able to contact the spirits of the dead. The article stresses that there is a clear modern continuity with the association of media technology with historic spiritualists but also discusses how ghost hunters use the Ghost Box to work alongside psychic mediums to enhance the validity of contact with ghosts. In this way, while the Ghost Box takes an element of the role of the psychic medium, it still needs a human factor in the interpretation of messages, and so radio technology is a distinctive example of technological spiritual communication but one that retains, albeit in a remediated way, the connections made between spiritualism and wireless communication in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the availability of ghost hunting technology like that used in paranormal reality television has also made ghost hunting a distinctive form of participatory media, further elucidating the links between spiritualist and wireless forms of paranormal communication.
Keywords: radio, mediums, spiritualism, reality television, Ghost Box, media, Radio Voice Phenomenon, wireless communication
Haunting Indonesia: Kuntilanak as the Traumatic Real of a Patriarchal Order, by Timo Duile (85-103)
Abstract: Kuntilanak is a ghost well-known in popular culture in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. The vampire-like female ghost also plays a crucial role in the founding myth of the city of Pontianak. By analyzing the motives and structures of Kuntilanak narratives, this article suggests that the horror of Kuntilanak originates from her place outside the symbolic order of patriarchal society. She dwells in the Lacanian Real and represents what Julia Kristeva has termed abject. Thus it is argued that Kuntilanak is not simply a product of Indonesian society, but that society is also her product in the sense that only through the act of excluding her, abjecting her, does society retroactively emerge as a seeming whole, as a symbolic order. This opens up new ways of developing a radical critique of the given social order in Indonesia, a critique which would give body to the negativity of Kuntilanak.
Keywords: Kuntilanak, Indonesia, Lacan, abject
Film Review Essay
Wieland (2024), by Kassie Jo Baron (105-113)
Book Reviews (115-140)
Choose PDF with all reviews from the print version or click on individual reviews for web versions
The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends, by Simon Young, reviewed by Deborah M. Fratz
The Ex-Human: Science Fiction and the Fate of Our Species, by Michael Bérubé, reviewed by Kathryn Harlan-Gran
Spiritualism’s Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Séances in Lily Dale, by Averill Earls, Sarah Handley-Cousins, Marissa C. Rhodes, and Elizabeth Garner Masarik, reviewed by Michele Hanks
Not of the Living Dead: The Non-Zombie Films of George A. Romero, by Noah Simon Jampol, Cain Miller, Leah Richards, and John R. Ziegler, reviewed by Daniel P. Compora
The Haunted States of America: Gothic Regionalism in Post-war American Fiction, by James Morgart, reviewed by Ilse Schrynemakers
The New Queer Gothic: Reading Queer Girls and Women in Contemporary Fiction and Film, by Robyn Ollett, reviewed by Amanda Cruz
Queer for Fear: Horror Film and the Queer Spectator, by Heather O. Petrocelli, reviewed by Pace Warfield