9/11 Gothic: Decrypting Ghosts and Trauma in New York City’s Terrorism Novels (Reading Trauma and Memory). This item is unavailable.9/11 Gothic: Decrypting Ghosts and Trauma in New York City’s Terrorism Novels (Reading Trauma and Memory)

Published to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, 9/11 Gothic: Decrypting Ghosts and Trauma in New York City’s Terrorism Novels returns to the ruins and anguish of 9/11 to pose a question not yet addressed by scholarship. Two time World Fantasy Award-winning writer Danel Olson asks how, why, and where New York City novels capture the terror of the Al-Qaeda mass murders through a supernatural lens. This book explores ghostly presences from the world’s largest crime scene in novels by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Griffin Hansbury, and Patrick McGrath―all of whom have been called writers of Gotham. Arguing how theories on trauma and the Gothic can combine to explain ghostly encounters civilian survivors experience in fiction, Olson shares what those eerie meetings express about grief, guilt, love, memory, sex, and suicidal urges. This book also explores why and how paths to recovery open for these ghost-visited survivors in the fiction of catastrophe from the early twenty-first century.

Danel Olson is a professor of Gothic fiction and survivor memoirs at Lone Star College in Houston, Texas. He is the creator of Exotic Gothic, a World Fantasy Finalist anthology series premiering stories from emerging and established writers in over thirty nations from Australia to Zimbabwe. First published by Canada's Ash-Tree Press and now continued by England's P.S. Publishing, Exotic Gothic 5 in 2013 debuted new stories from Joyce Carol Oates and many others. He has taught in Israel, Canada, China, and America on film and literature. Three-time finalist for the Bram Stoker Award and winner of a Shirley Jackson Award and two World Fantasy Awards, his published work has been called “a major contribution to film history and scholarship” by the Washington Post. His most recent volume is Lexington Books' 9/11/ Gothic: Decrypting Ghosts and Trauma in New York City's Terrorism Fiction, which was nominated for the 2021 Bram Stoker Award in Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction. Dr. Danel Olson's other edited works in print include 21st Century Gothic: Great Gothic Fiction Since 2000, The Exorcist: Studies in the Horror Film, Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining: Studies in the Horror Film, Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone: Studies in the Horror Film and Pan's Labyrinth: Studies in the Horror Film, the latter two being nominated for the Bram Stoker Award in Superior Achievement in Non-Fiction.