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California Gothic explores the California dream and its dark inversion as a nightmare, as illustrated in fiction, poetry, and film. California began as a literary invention, a magic island, in a Spanish romance before conquistadors first visited the land. From early days to the present, the California dream of happiness in a land of new beginnings has been maintained by suppression of disturbing realities: above all, the destruction of native peoples; and by events and facts such as the tragedy of the Donner Party, the persistence of poverty and crime in the golden land, disturbing crimes such as the Black Dahlia; and pandemics and ecological disaster. This book explores a rich Gothic tradition that exposes the repressed past and imagines the fates awaiting a failed California.
Dark secrets, the Uncanny, wrecked illusions: Charles L. Crow shows how such Gothic conventions form a spectral, abiding undertow in California literature from Ambrose Bierce to Thomas Pynchon and Octavia Butler. He explores how recurrently the Golden State has represented not the cutting but the bleeding edge of the American Dream.—Michael Kowalewski, Lloyd McBride Professor of English and Environmental Studies, Carleton College, USA.
Contents; Chapter One- Dreams of the Magic Island; Chapter Two- Ambrose Bierce and San Francisco’s Gothic Frontier; Chapter Three- Lost Coasts; Chapter Four- Disease, Pandemics, and the Monstrous; Chapter Five- The Shadow Line: Noir and California Gothic; Chapter Six- California Ecogothic: What’s Buried in the Basement; Afterword