Journeys into Darkness: Critical Essays on Gothic Horror JamesGoho. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.

Journeys into Darkness: Critical Essays on Gothic Horror James Goho. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.This collection of essays examines what the author calls "dread... primal fear and an ontological unease in the world" (3). Containing ten chapters, six of which are revisions of previously published essays, Goho explores four themes found in Gothic literature. These four include the urban landscape, the wilderness, the "manifestation of economic, social, and political anxieties and conflicts," and a voice which is given to those who suffer or experience evil (3, 4). Essays consider five American and two British authors, including Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, H. P. Lo veer aft, and Fritz Leiber.According to the author, all four of the themes mentioned above can be found in the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown. Goho states that Brown created not just the American Urban Gothic, but American Gothic as a whole. Flis novels "depict family disintegration and individual disintegration through collisions with the uncanny" (7). Goho discusses three of Brown's novels in this chapter with Wieland being an example of how the isolation of the wilderness can turn a family man into a killer; Arthur Mervyn being an example of how disease can turn civilized people into savages; and, Edgar Huntly being an example of how civilized man turns into a savage in the wilderness, when confronted with the savages who are already there (American Indians.Likewise, these four themes can be found in a variety of works that trace their beginning to the Salem witch trials. Witchcraft, an Old World phenomenon, found fertile ground in the New World among "the dark, brooding side of Puritanism" (163), fear of the Indians and the vast, potentially hostile wilderness. Attempting to escape economic, political, social, and religious injustice, colonists merely recreated the New World in image of the Old. He examines a number of "witch" narratives, such as those by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Edith Wharton, Fritz Leiber, and John Updike. Anyone who reads contemporary horror fiction or watches films in the genre knows that the witch is not dead. Rather she is a "continuing archetype because... [she] speaks to a primal fear. It is not the fear of a witch; rather it is the fear of relentless and violent persecution" (176) that induces us to read or watch these instantiations of the Gothic.Goho analyzes four short works by the prolific British writer Arthur Machen that reflect the third theme of the Gothic. These are "The Great God Pan," "The Inmost Light," "The Shining Pyramid," and "The White People." These stories were written in the late Victorian era; all concern science and ask the question, "Do the ends justify the means?" The male scientists in the stories certainly believe the answer is "yes," and each story illustrates what they are willing to do for knowledge's sake. In each story, women are the victims of horrific experiments, and, in all, these women die violent deaths. In the end, says the author, "it is all about the sacrifice of women to appease the desires of men for knowledge and control" (73).Algernon Blackwood's Canadian stories, according to Goho, propose that "nature is wondrous but perilous" (93). Stories such as "The Wendigo" and "The Haunted Island" reveal the wilderness landscape as sublime, intensely beautiful, and awe-inspiring, but terrifying in its vastness. It harkens back to our early ancestors and their fear of the dark and all that the dark contained. And, it speaks to the fear of loneliness as well. Confronted with the wilderness' majesty, one feels how truly small and alone one is. Goho believes that Blackwood's short stories yield a forest "more beautifully described and ... more alive and sentient than the human characters" (92).Whereas Blackwood presents the wilderness as a backdrop upon which to expose humankind's loneliness, Fritz Leiber sets it against the urban landscape. …