This collection of essays aims to chart the survival of the gothic strain - the dark, the forbidding, the alienated and the fantastic. The book represents a variety of approaches from a group of international scholars to the making of a contemporary tradition. It offers information and interpretation concerning the presence of gothicism in a number of different contexts. There are essays on postmodernism and gothicism; the politics of neo-Gothic 'pertrification' in Iain Banks and John Banville; the horrors of the pre-oedipal Father in 'Blue Velvet'; the gothic unconscious of feminist criticism; postmodern 'feminine' horror fiction; Isak Dinesen; serial form in slasher and monster movies; Toni Morrison's gothic spaces in 'Beloved'; Stephen King; Angela Carter; 1950s body snatching and alien invasions; postcolonial gothic; and Ramsay Campbell's debt to the traditional gothic. The contributors present a variety of approaches including feminist, sociocultural and post-psychoanalytic frameworks along with examples of how they can be applied in contemporary contexts.