Eighteenth-century explorers and settler colonials in Appalachia encountered massive old-growth forests and as early as 1742 discovered coal deposits alongside a river in West Virginia, marking the beginning of a highly covetous or vampiric approach to the region's natural resources that has shaped Appalachia ever since. From deforestation to deep coal mining, and from mountaintop removal (MTR) to fracking, time and again an extractive logic has been applied to the region, a logic defined by profit margins and callous disregard for the health of the environment and local communities.

All too often when outsiders think of Appalachia, they struggle to see beyond stereotypes to acknowledge the costs of fossil fuel extraction. Instead, and by a cynical sleight of hand, rural Appalachia and its people are viewed as a foreboding threat, which neatly serves to deflect from the real horrors of extraction. Such misapprehensions are tightly woven into the popular imagination because it is more comforting to accept that rural Appalachians are gun-toting, toothless terrors, than it is to expose and recognize the real monster in the room. That monster, of course, is generated by extraction. In his work specifically on rural horror in Appalachia, McClanahan asks, “What if the horrifying reality of the rural is a result of the ways that those landscapes and people have been exploited and harmed by human activity and capital?” For McClanahan, extraction wreaks havoc and devastation on both people and the environment, therefore across Appalachian literature extraction and the gothic are symbiotic, resulting in a body of work that writes back against fossil fuel extractivism, exposing its horrors and inequity.

Indeed, in her work on extraction and British literature, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller argues that “literary form and genre produce and extend extractivism as a mode of environmental understanding because of the deep and durational qualities of discourse.” It is, she suggests, the “durational qualities of lan-guage, genre, and form” that ensures “literature engages with environmental materiality across time, and for this reason it is a crucial archive for understanding the relation between environmental history and environmental crises today.”

Appalachia has played a critical role in the growth and progress of the national economy, but its gothic literature demands pause, time to question the costs of a relentless pursuit of growth, from the forced removal of Indigenous people to slavery, and from coal mining to the climate crisis. Of course, the climate crisis is arguably the most existential threat, and pushing beyond the term Anthropocene, Botting coins the term “Monstrocene” to encompass the human and non-human terrors and horrors of the climate crisis. Yet Botting cautions against the pitfalls of dark ecology and a tendency to frame the climate crisis in purely monstrous terms, concerned that climate monsters may “only serve to horrify and paralyze all thought, all imagination, all response.” However, in a region rendered monstrous in the popular imagination, Appalachian authors must turn to the monstrous, not to “paralyze,” but to expose the monster for what it really is and in the case of the climate crisis, the monster is partly formed by the waves of fossil fuel extraction that have wreaked destruction across the region.

The critical reflections on an extractive logic across Appalachian gothic literature are a repeated refrain, a ballad about the destruction of place and the devastating costs to the humans and non-humans. Sharae Deckard reminds us “capitalism is always in search of new commodity frontiers for extraction and appropriation,” and the alternate energy demands of the green transition continue to demand extraction. The lithium required especially for “electric vehicles and battery manufacturing” means the “demand for lithium” just in the United States, “is expected to grow more than six times by […] the end of the decade.” This demand is generating a new boom in Appalachian areas rich in lithium reserves: the federal government as well as several companies are investing in battery factories and electric car plants in the region. In economically depressed communities the prospect of new jobs as part of the green transition is vital, but in a region where extraction has come at great costs to the health of the environment and residents, there are grave concerns about the destructive impacts of this latest turn to Appalachia as a natural resource to be harnessed for the greater good. The question remains about whether the green transition can approach extraction any differently, especially when it is driven largely by the private sector.

“There is a strange awfulness about Appalachia that quickens the imagination,” writes Guy Davenport in his 1968 review of Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark (1968), drawing on the commonplace idea of Appalachia as a region distinctly other, distinctly gothic: a place replete with isolated communities, “hillbillies” and violent feuding families, a place to be feared. The idea of Appalachia as monstrous other was fueled by travelogues and literature of the region in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and further compounded by the American eugenics movement. Richard Knox Robinson notes, “For over 100 years the American eugenics movement used the hillbilly stereotype to justify its surveillance, categorization, institutionalization, and sterilization of what they called ‘defectives’.” This othering of Appalachia and its people sat in direct contrast to the romanticization of Appalachia as a place where folk traditions and independence shaped local culture, turning the region into what Ronald Eller terms “a Janus-faced ‘other’.” While competing ideas of the region still hold firm in the national imaginary, sentimentalism pales into the background as the notion of Appalachia as horrific other prevails, repeatedly reanimated in an array of cultural productions including John Boorman's notorious 1972 film adaptation of James Dickey's Deliverance (1970), Robert Schenkkan's play The Kentucky Cycle (1993), and J. D. Vance's controversial memoir, Hillbilly Elegy (2016). This book is the first extended study of Appalachia's major gothic literature, exploring both its extensive reach and impact as it challenges and changes ideas of the region and its people.

Of course, like many places across the world, Appalachia is replete with legends and folklore, and all manner of gothic creatures populate the region's storytelling. From the earliest Indigenous peoples to settler colonials, from slaves to their descendants, and the waves of immigration that continue to shape Appalachia, there are copious tales of shapeshifters, witches, creatures, cryptids, ghouls, ghosts, and monsters that haunt the region's storytelling. The region's literature also turns to several superstitions, including the tree in Granny May's garden full of dangling “Multicolored glass bottles” to capture and contain the “evils” that might “come skulking over the far hills, out of the lightless hollers” in Taylor Brown's Gods of Howl Mountain (2018) and the range of superstitions around childbirth such as the “cross/fastened to the pillow warding off haints” in Chanda Feldman's poem “But We Lived” (2018).

Wars and diseases of despair are neither uniquely Appalachian nor southern nor American, but they are decidedly gothic. As Agnieszka Soltysik Monnet and Steffan Hantke indicate, “The Gothic […] thrived in its infancy, in times of war” and from “the atrocities of the French Revolution” to “the Napoleonic Wars,” warfare “provided a steady background noise to the development of the genre.” Moreover, Carol Davison argues that ever since its earliest iterations “the Gothic and addiction go virtually hand-in-glove.” While the war gothic and what Davison terms, “Gothic pharmography,” cannot be claimed by any one subgenre of the gothic, Appalachia's complex role in the Civil War where many communities held divided loyalties between the Union and Confederacy, its high percentage of military personnel, and the propensity for diseases of despair where poverty and limited job opportunities can result in high addiction levels, mean both the war gothic and gothic pharmography recur across the region's literature. Appalachian authors commonly turn to Civil War ghosts, traumatized war veterans, zombie-like drug addicts, and vampiric Big Pharma, as they present a region that, according to Stephen J. Scanlan, is “‘mined’ for its citizens in the same way it has been mined for coal,” a region highly susceptible to the machinations of Big Pharma and military recruitment.

For Monnet and Hantke, the Civil War gothic largely emerged after 1865, and as Leigh M. McLennon explains, typically, “The history of the Civil War is often framed through narratives that posit binaries about slavery versus freedom, the North versus the South and, correspondingly, good versus evil.” However, such binaries do not hold up in many parts of Appalachia. As Kenneth W. Noe notes, one of the many misapprehensions of Appalachia is that the region was almost “totally Unionist,” a stereotype “rejected […] by modern Appalachian historians” who have revealed the region also had a significant Confederate population. At the same time, George McKinney explains, across the region “the majority of mountaineers resisted the move to create a separate Southern nation,” a “sentiment” that “was strongest in East Tennessee, northwestern Virginia, western Maryland, and southeastern Kentucky” where a commitment to the Confederacy was not immediately guaranteed.

Teresa Goddu saliently notes that “the American gothic is haunted by race” and that “when race is restored to the darkness of American literature, the gothic reappears as a viable category.” Goddu also traces the emergence of the southern gothic, where slavery, segregation, and systemic racism heavily influence the region's gothicism. By necessity, as a subgenre within both the American and southern gothic, the Appalachian gothic is haunted by slavery and settler colonization. Engaging with this haunting past and its impacts on the present is a critical part of challenging the misconceptions of the region. Writing from both rural and urban experiences, Indigenous, Black, immigrant, and first-generation writers play a critical role in challenging and rewriting the region, often exploring intersectionality at the crossroads of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and this chapter moves from a discussion of race to LGBTQ+ rights. As Hilary Glasby, Sherrie Gradin, and Rachael Ryseron argue, “Appalachian queerness remains underrepresented, misunderstood, sometimes muted, and sometimes invisible.” The Appalachian gothic plays a significant role in exposing historical and contemporaneous injustices and prejudices across the region and challenges the failure to register Appalachia's complexity and diversity.

Engaging with the region's diversity obviously serves to write back against monolithic ideas of Appalachian culture as white, heteronormative, masculine, and conservative, ideas that were reinforced after the 2016 presidential election, and the stamp of “Trump Country” that marked out Appalachia, aligning it with the “racism, cruelty, bigotry and abuse” that were the hallmarks of Donald Trump's campaign and presidency. In a period where hard-won equal rights for women and LGBTQ+ people are threatened, and far-right populism across Western democracies stirs up what McCollum lists as “the stench of slavery, anti-Semitism, genocide, fascism, and neo-Nazism,” as well as Islamophobia, it is vital to explore the ways Appalachian authors, both before and since 2016, have deployed the gothic to expose how such sentiments were never fully expunged and what is at stake in their frightful resurgence.

Race and Gothic Appalachian Literature

Appalachia's racial diversity has a long and complicated history. Essays across William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell's edited collection Blacks in Appalachia, “demonstrate that Black Appalachians were some of America's first blacks—appearing almost a century before the landing at Jamestown.”