Baron Dupotet, though a Frenchman, is denominated 'the English Pope of animal magnetism' in The Athenaeum review, and the writer takes pains to exemplify the 'imputed facts' of mesmerism through reference to his printed words. The verbal ramblings of Dupotet's entranced subjects, however, allude rather to Marquis de Puysegur's demonstrations of magnetic sleep and that condition's associations with clairvoyance and alternative personality. Modern histories of hypnotism tend to open the narrative of Dr John Elliotson's protracted encounter with the O'Key sisters by way of an anonymous account published in the pages of The Lancet. The Times' article is arguably significant for its dissemination among a non-clinical audience of the nature of the experiments by which Thomas Wakley disproved Elliotson's claims regarding the magnetic susceptibility of the O'Key sisters.

D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf are unlikely subjects for comparision, but both were non-combatant authors profoundly disillusioned by the war. Both are concerned with issues of gender and seek to break from the pre-war hierarchies, although the changes they desire are radically opposed. Lawrence opposes the war from its beginning, and the way it leads to an increasingly authoritarian state, famously fictionalised in Kangaroo. His compelling, dissenting prose expresses revulsion at the impact of mechanisation and mass culture in fictional and non-fictional prose. Those anxieties reach a peak in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, still in 1928 clearly a response to the war. Woolf is equally concerned about mass culture. She rarely focuses on the war, but it is an absent presence in her nineteen twenties work. Mrs Dalloway offers the clearest comment on the iniquities of the war, but Jacob’s Room is a literary cenotaph, the title character out of view at its centre; To the Lighthouse is similarly haunted by parenthetical deaths. Both authors seek to mobilise disenchantment with the war as a catalyst for positive change.

Globalgothic focuses on certain negative aspects of globalisation, including corporatism, neo-imperialism and the dangers of living in a high-risk culture that frequently sails perilously close to catastrophe. An interesting twenty-first-century version of gothic, The Dark Knight reworks classic gothic devices to structure its plot dynamic. It not only adapts the concept of the city space as threatening but also exploits the figure of the double or doppelganger. The Dark Knight is a work that openly focuses on men, power and the law despite its flirtation with romantic love. In fact what The Dark Knight illustrates so chillingly are the threats, uncertainties and negative spin-offs that result from what Zygmunt Bauman has termed 'liquid modernity'. Bauman's vision seems to be reflected in The Dark Knight to generate a potent, if perhaps only half-consciously realised, fear in the audience: fear of political, economic and judicial impotence in a 'speedflow' world.

Globalisation has led to a new way of thinking about gothic production: globalgothic. The global market of signs, images and commodities energises globalgothic interactions. As a result globalgothic operates as a locus, frequently an obscure locus, of world exchanges, and also points to the context in which messages, meanings, responses and reactions take shape. Globalgothic asks vital questions about the decentring of power. For while it can be packaged, marketed and sold, globalgothic can also reveal the terrors of global terrorism or how oppositional movements might challenge the powerful hegemonic discourses of free market, neo-liberal ideologies. Seen from a globalgothic perspective the use of haunting in postcolonial theory reflects a suspended condition, in-between. This is indicative of an era hovering between the traces of a defeated colonial history and vague transnational structures of hierarchy and subjugation.

In Japan numerous expressions of high figurality are having the effect of reanimating the present, lending to the globalgothic a complicated, nuanced fear that appears as both horror and reverence. Today, as a dominant source of globalised popular culture, Japan's contributions to the globalgothic force the readers to rethink the definition of the gothic. This chapter allows readers to understand both fear and the gothic in a broader way, one that follows from nothing less than a new way of framing the modern era. In the West the gothic emerges as a form of doubt about the rational scepticism that led to the Enlightenment. Insisting that gothic fear be only horrifying is to remain trapped within a modern expressive regime that is no longer well supported either by contemporary expressive technologies or by a concomitant postwar resurgence of animism.

Chapter 6 is also concerned with the American nuclear family in his discussion of Pet Sematary, Stephen King’s most complex and pessimistic analysis of the American family. This Gothic novel presents the family from the outset as an effect of significations produced and read in faces. Faces demarcate structures of communication, exchange and power that regulate and organize the family and its relations to friends, neighbours and others – and, eventually, to Otherness itself. Sears argues that King deploys facial codes to figure this displacement and fracturing. Defaced elements of the family return as murderously persistent trace-effects of patriarchal desire. Pet Sematary deploys these faces and facelessnesses to envisage a critique of fatherhood itself as a dangerous surplus to its own structures, deluded, irrational, driven by the very forces it seeks to repress. Sears reads the facial troping of King’s novel as a definitive intervention in contemporary Gothic’s rethinking of the family.

Pan-Asian gothic is a manifestation of globalgothic rather than global gothic. The films discussed in this chapter are the award-winning portmanteau Kwaidan and A Tale of Two Sisters, two films that exemplify the merging of the global with the local in the construction of pan-Asian gothic. The display of self-Orientalism as demonstrated by these two films necessitates a different way of thinking about the gothic on a global scale. Similarly, the holding up of visuality both as resistance to the logic of domination and as acquiescence to its 'to-be-looked-at-ness' also necessitates the same. The return to the premodern and oral traditions, a key component of pan-Asian Gothic, can be read as a resistance to the global at the level of the local. The act of translation and localisation functions to foreground what Roland Robertson calls 'the global-local' problematic in his discussion of glocalisation.

In its analysis of Keith Ridway’s novel The Parts, the chapter examines the ways in which the specificity of ‘Irishness’ is conveyed in relation to black Otherness. In particular, the contribution studies in detail the intercultural encounters between the protagonist, a ‘typical’ Irish character, and his African neighbours, and concludes that the novel mimics, or performs, the historical Irish ‘empathy’ for black people.

Urban spaces also become the backdrop for the literary works discussed in this chapter. In his detailed assessment of the Irish crime fiction of the last decade, the author analyses the way in which the novels of John Brady, Gene Kerrigan, Ingrid Black, and Niamh O'Connor, among others, portray immigrants as victims of Irish people, who often exploit them in criminal activities such as the trafficking of narcotics, prostitution, and the illegal movement of other immigrants. These migrant characters usually inhabit the ‘mean streets’ of Dublin, Galway, Limerick, and Cork. This signals the recent interest of Irish crime writers in setting their plots in ‘homegrown’ locations, in contrast to previous novels which tended to fictionalise crime in non-Irish settings.

Of the stories reprinted in Thomas Pynchon's Slow Learner, this chapter discusses three in detail: 'Low-lands', 'The Secret Integration' and 'Entropy'. These have been selected because they best represent Pynchon's earliest articulations of some of the tropes and ideas that have preoccupied him throughout his writing career. 'Low-lands' concerns itself most explicitly with the pressures of American conformity as they exert themselves at mid-century, and the possible paths that might lead to liberation or transcendence. 'The Secret Integration', in its comic fantasy of children's attempts to rebel against a dominant white society, imagines a politics built around secrecy, espionage and private spaces. 'Entropy' is Thomas Pynchon's most anthologised work and has come to be regarded as an early incarnation of many of the thematics that would go on to characterise his writing as a whole.