Category: 53.2

Review of Renegades and Rogues: The Life and Legacy of Robert E. Howard

William Perpétuo Busch

Vick, Todd B. Renegades and Rogues: The Life and Legacy of Robert E. Howard. University of Texas Press, 2021. Hardcover. 266 pg. $29.95. ISBN 9781477321959. Ebook ISBN  9781477321973.

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In this book, Todd B. Vick manages to offer a biography of Robert E. Howard that marks a new phase for academic scholarship about Howard. Previously, the main reference for Howard’s life was the biography written by L. Sprague de Camp, Catherine Crook de Camp, and Jane W. Griffin, Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard (1983), which was problematic for a number of different reasons. Mark Finn’s book about Howard, Blood and Thunder (2006), pointed out the mistakes of the early biographers and how they tried to fit Howard into a psychoanalytic narrative that justified their own interpretations. Vick’s work extends the road that was paved by Finn, but this is not done with just the addition of a mere series of events that are described. On the contrary, Vick employs a vast array of sources to establish the details of Howard’s life. This is the strong point of the book, as Vick does not try to hide his own interpretation of Howard’s work. The narrative is sensitive to the interaction between context and the literature. Organized in 14 chapters, the book starts with Howard’s mother and father’s life and recounts how they were constantly moving and traveling. This documentation of Howard’s early life as one of constant movement allows the reader to understand how Texas was important in the development of Howard’s personality and literature. In the second chapter, Vick reveals how Howard’s later stories were inspired by the lives and experiences of people that told him their stories when he was young. Two of these were former slaves: Mary Bohannon and Arabella Davis.

The first twelve chapters explore Howard’s life; the final two explore its aftermath and Howard’s father organizing the material left by his son. Vick posits an amateur phase (1919-1923) for Howard’s career that was mostly reconstructed from Howard’s correspondence with a small circle of friends. The defining element of this phase is the circulation of his stories in school newspapers. The second phase covers his early fiction (1924-1928), in which Howard experimented with different genres in a moment where most of his work was rejected by the more prestigious magazines, or the slicks. Swift acceptance into the pulps was achieved with “Spear and Fang” for Weird Fiction in 1925 and opened the way for a new market.

The third phase (1928-1932) opened with the creation of characters such as Solomon Kane and Kull of Atlantis, as Howard’s fantasy worlds converged, sharing a similar historical and mythological background. The correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft that started in 1930 revealed their shared interest in history while at the same time served to connect Howard with other authors and editors. From this new network, Howard managed to establish a position as a writer and gradually expanded his stories to the final period (1932-1936), where adventure fantasy would slowly open the way for the production of westerns. The transition point was “Beyond the Black River” (1935). Vick identifies the development of this western story with a barbarian as the main character as advancing Howard’s argument that barbarism was not negative but the final triumph and the natural state of man.

After the twelve chapters close with the aftermath of Howard’s death, the following chapter offers an analysis of some stories. Since most of the material was already covered in the book, it’s interesting to see the development of Vick’s interpretations. However, the problem is the final chapter, as it tries to deal with a different question that demands by itself a whole new book. The chapter centers on the circulation, publication, editing and appropriation of Howard’s work by other authors (including de Camp), and also the adaptations of the stories to different types of media. Different from the rest of the book where the literature was understood with a sensibility to the context of its production, the shift is dramatic.

Robert E. Howard was a racist. Vick acknowledges that by showing how Howard’s views were different from those of Novalyne Price, who was a teacher of English in Cross Plains High School and a writer. Price confronted Howard, revealing his racist and sexist view of society. This brings into focus the early comments about the impact of Bohannon and Davis, the former slaves from whom Howard heard stories. The story “Black Canaan” that appeared in Weird Tales (June 1936) was racist and revealed Howard’s view that slavery was wrong because it was responsible for practices of miscegenation that produced a “mongrel race.” However, Howard’s racism is contextualized by pointing out that Howard was born into a racist society. Vick tries to discuss the topic of race by pointing out that racist stereotypes are common in stories of the period.

It’s important to point out that Vick doesn’t want (or try) to justify Howard’s racism. His objective is to propose the relevance of Howard’s work to American Literature. However, because he does not face the issue of racism on the first page, the result is problematic. The names of Bohannon and Davis serve as tokens that put into evidence the problem of how a white man created a narrative from black experiences and didn’t credit them in public. Howard’s racism was central in his network of relations and played an important role (the case of Novalyne Price is exemplary), but Vick avoids it. This implies that there is not a very deep exploration of how Howard’s racism changed (if it did) in his works. This could serve as a connection to the material of the final chapter—when Howard’s work influenced the rest of the twentieth century, did this racist content change? Does Conan in the magazines and movies share these stereotypes? How have they impacted the constitution of the genre of sword-and-sorcery? I ask these questions as a Brazilian scholar—from a country that structured itself by reacting to the process of miscegenation with a eugenic politics of “branqueamento” [whitening] that lead to the reinforcement of structural racism. In Howard’s view, I’m the “mongrel.” So these are not “political correctness” inquiries but ones not only important to the future of Howard’s scholarship but also that must be answered.

Willian Perpétuo Busch is a Brazilian Ph.D. Candidate in Universidade Federal do Paraná working on the history of Science Fiction in American Academia.

Review of The Culture of “The Culture”

Jeremy Brett

Joseph S. Norman. The Culture of “The Culture”: Utopian Processes in Iain M. Banks’s Space Opera Series. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2021. Hardcover. 272 pg. $120.00. ISBN 9781789621747.

On the face of it, the Culture of Iain M. Banks’ acclaimed star-spanning series of novels and short stories is one of the most attractive social systems in science fiction. Who wouldn’t want to live in a post-scarcity civilization, where money doesn’t exist (nor the need to work for it); where one has essentially unlimited freedom over one’s body, destiny, and physical environment; and where immensely powerful AIs do all the behind-the-scenes work of governance and keeping civilization running? Aside from the occasional encounter with hostile aliens, it sounds a complete dream, the very epitome of the word utopian. Joseph Norman in his new study of Banks’ Culture refuses, however, to let that simple contention lie and provides a thoughtful uncovering of the ways in which the Culture meets and sometimes transcends the common understanding of a utopia, as well as a deep analysis of Banks’ evolution of the Culture over time in response to world events of the 1970s (the first work in the series, the poem “Zakalwe’s Song” was written in 1973) through the early 2000s (The Hydrogen Sonata was published in 2012).

Norman also posits that the Culture as a whole avoids easy textual and critical interpretation, as an active and ever-evolving system, or, as Norman defines it, “a collective philosophy, an identity, a shared way of living” (3). One of Norman’s foci, in fact, concerns the singular ways in which the Culture is nontraditional in its utopian nature and self-conception. The Culture—unlike other SF “utopias” such as the bureaucratic and govermentalized Federation of Star Trek—is based around a common idea and shared practice of the way things should be:

The Culture is a collection of artificial environments, whose inhabitants are linked primarily by shared achievements, practices, and customs, worldviews, behaviours, liked by and representative of a shared utopian culture. The Culture is something that you do, as well as somewhere you live…The Culture is fractal and twelve tonal because its fundamental values and philosophies run through it at every level, forming a broader, inter-locking utopian system. (261) 

It’s a continually evolving and changing practice of living, not a political state, existing above and beyond the various troublesome features of our own world that prevent us from experiencing full freedom—political divisions, religion, economic inequality, late-stage capitalism, racism, etc.

Norman’s book is, in brief, a study of many of the various aspects of the Culture that make it what it is. Norman offers a valuable and comprehensive introduction that describes the Culture generally; positions the writing of the Culture series alongside geopolitical events that inspired Banks’ thought (such as the Cold War, Thatcherism, and the growth of right-wing neoliberalism); and sets Banks’ work within the greater context of the New Space Opera phenomenon that reformulated and subverted the traditional space operas of writers like Smith and Heinlein. Norman also examines the ongoing critical debate over the utopian nature of the Culture, as a step in framing his own contention that the Culture is indeed a “kind of utopia” in the sense of being (quoting Ruth Levitas) “the expression of desire for a better way of living and of being.” (30). The remainder of Norman’s study is geared towards reaffirming and explicating the ways in which Banks expresses this utopian desire, as a series of processes rather than focusing upon some definitive end result. It’s a fruitful method of argument which I think is perfectly designed to reflect the complex and myriad series of shifting modes of behavior and decision-making that constitute the Culture throughout the series.

Subsequent chapters in the book examine the Culture through a number of thematic lenses. Norman analyzes the problematic, even contradictory nature of the Culture’s interventionist impulse (expressed in the series primarily through its agency devoted to relations with outsiders known as Contact and Contact’s undercover arm Special Circumstances). How does a utopia intervene in galactic affairs and maintain its fundamental nature without assuming the burdens and identity of empire? It is a vital question, one Norman asks in the context of Csicsery-Ronay’s concept of the technologiade—that is, the process of humanity’s creation of a ‘technoutopia’ by which they might master the physical world through the use of incredibly advanced technology. Norman also looks at the Culture’s post-scarcity economic system, noting the ways in which such a state frees human behavior from political and social limitations; and the tension between human and post-human nature existing in a universe where humans have eschewed or radically put off things like poor health, aging, and death. How do humans visualize the body in such a system, and how does the extension of life affect how they live that life? As the Culture in its drive towards utopia has eliminated class differences and age/generational differences, so too does it equalize its citizens in terms of gender and religion. In subsequent chapters Norman discusses Banks’ expansion of gender identity and the ways that expansion frees Culture citizens to explore themselves (though he makes note of Banks’ limited conceptions of queer and  trans identities), the role of humanism in Culture thought and practice, and, very intriguingly, how art and the artistic impulse are expressed in a utopian state like the Culture. All in all, Norman provides a deep, thorough overview of the complex world of the Culture and the ways in which it both fulfills and belies our assumptions about a utopian society.

One of the book’s most important achievements is demonstrating that the Culture is not merely utopian within the context of the series itself, but also provides a hopeful direction forward for us as the readers. Norman notes the dark times in which we live, but finds hope in Banks’ own sense of hope, his hope “in the near limitless horizon of technology and science, tempered by a core belief in humankind’s potential for compassionate thinking, collective action, and reasoned logic.” (260) That optimism drives Banks’ work, and it goes far in explaining why the Culture sequence remains not only eminently and beautifully readable but an emotional necessity for this historical moment.

Jeremy Brett is an Associate Professor at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, where he is both Processing Archivist and the Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection. He has also worked at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region, and the Wisconsin Historical Society. He received his MLS and his MA in History from the University of Maryland – College Park in 1999. His professional interests include science fiction, fan studies, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.

Review of Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color

C. Palmer-Patel

Joy Sanchez-Taylor. Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color. Ohio State UP, 2021. New Suns: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Speculative. Paperback. 188 pg. $29.95. ISBN 9780814257975.

By probing works of science fiction by authors of color, Joy Sanchez-Taylor’s Diverse Futures addresses an incredibly necessary missing facet of science fiction literature and criticism. While there have been a number of critical works that focus on specific cultures and locales, Sanchez-Taylor takes on the incredible task of finding common ground between narratives from a variety of different cultures and racial identities (all published in the US and Canada in the English language). Rather than taking a survey approach, Sanchez-Taylor focuses on themes that decenter a Eurowestern perspective on science fiction. She approaches this undertaking deftly and sensitively. It would have been easy for an academic to conflate connections and thereby homogenize cultures, but Sanchez-Taylor avoids this pitfall with a notable hesitancy throughout the book. While a hesitant tone is not usually a quality to aspire to in a scholarly text, I use this assessment here not as a critique, but in praise: her tone serves as a useful model to other scholars who may be examining identities with which they themselves may not identify; rather than authoritatively sweeping these gaps under the rug, Sanchez-Taylor recognizes her own limitations and biases in a conscientious way.

The monograph begins with an introduction that acknowledges that the act of defining science fiction itself is charged with Eurocentric overtones, as the demarcation of ‘science’ and ‘rationality’ are generally taken from a Eurowestern point of view. This problem of definitions continues as Sanchez-Taylor expounds on debates of more culturally specific genre labels such as Afrofuturism alongside considerations of nomenclatures of peoples and cultures themselves, such as Latinx. In a footnote, Sanchez-Taylor clarifies, “I recognizes that any catch-all descriptor comes with issues, so I am choosing the term that is, to date, the most contemporary and inclusive term available” (16). This remark not only exemplifies Sanchez-Taylor’s care towards her chosen subject, but also an awareness of the ways that language and subtext may shift in the future.

The meat of the monograph is spread over four chapters which arguably may be read out of order, with each chapter further divided into sectioned themes and motifs. As a result, the text would work well in the classroom as sections can be selected to suit the topic of discussion at hand. For instance, chapter 1, “Space Travel and First Contact Narratives,” is sectioned into alien invasions, first contact and colonial relations, interplanetary diaspora and adaptation, and decentering the human. Overall, the chapter focuses on the inevitable colonization themes of space exploration and alien contact narratives. Sanchez-Taylor presents several authors of color who further the boundaries of these themes by complicating the role of alien as Other, focusing on examples that pose the alien as benevolent or malevolent colonizer/explorer rather than as a colonized entity mistreated by humans. Chapter 2, “Race, Genetics, and Science Fiction,” turns to considerations of how narratives of science and technology can be used to perpetuate race discrimination. Here and throughout all four chapters, Sanchez-Taylor effectively integrates close reading of fictional texts with examinations of real-world historical narratives, critical theories, and legal factoids. Spanning a range of examples from nineteenth century Social Darwinism to more recent trends such as genealogy and common sites such as AncestryDNA, these examples are set alongside reflections on documented medical apartheid, experimentation without consent, and eugenics, all of which demonstrate the ways in which scientific language has been historically used to justify the subjugation of peoples of color. This seamless blending of fictional analysis with real-world politics is one of the main strengths of the monograph, as it leads the reader away from hypothetical thought and theory into making connections with the experiences and mistreatment of real people and cultures.

The references to real events throughout also place the text as a valuable contribution to science fiction studies, as it situates and contextualizes many science fiction texts that are too often read in a vacuum. For instance, in chapter 3, “The Apocalypse Has Already Come: Post-Apocalyptic Landscapes,” Sanchez-Taylor begins with illustrations of colonial history and how “Eurowestern colonizers justified their colonization of peoples […] based on the argument that “certain races and ethnicities were more prone to criminal behaviors” (86). She uses the example of the Criminal Tribes Act of 1911; grounding race crimes in such legal history then allows Sanchez-Taylor to provide additional context for the ongoing interrogations of citizen and resident rights and freedoms, raising the issue of the culture of surveillance and containment in the U.S, which she then parallels in her exploration of dystopic fiction. Sanchez-Taylor then moves to zombie narratives, presenting another form of the supernatural Other but this time as a means to question the characters’ (and thus the audience’s) human superiority. Reminding the reader that “[t]he zombie figure was born of colonial slave violence” (107), Sanchez-Taylor presents the zombie as a sanctioned fantasy of racial violence and argues that these narratives force the audience to evaluate their own parallels with both human and zombie. The ongoing theme of decentering the Eurocentric view is expanded in Chapter 4, “‘Our Knowledge Is Not Primitive’: Indigenous and Eurowestern Science,” which continues the conversation begun in the introduction, that of the problems of defining science fiction—and science itself—through a Eurowestern lens. Here Sanchez-Taylor presents an important and timely global issue, that of climate change, by considering the global-connectedness views of Indigenous peoples with the more anthrocentric approach of Eurowestern scientists. The chapter thus adds further nuances to analyses of climate fiction, focusing as it does on the ways in which primarily Westernized science and technology has contributed to the climate crisis.

There are few moments throughout the monograph which could have benefitted from early signposting of the connections between racial disparities and problems of gender, sexuality, and class struggles. A reader familiar with science fiction criticism (presumably the target audience of the book) would have immediately made these connections themselves before Sanchez-Taylor draws her arguments to include these considerations. But this criticism is one I make as a content editor, and it does not detract from the strength and value of the overall monograph. Indeed, if I have one quibble with the text, it is of an opportunity lost: while the monograph is an absolute essential for science fiction students and scholars—especially as universities move globally to decolonize the classroom—the book would also have been equally valued, if not more, if aimed at postcolonial critics. Diverse Futures: Science Fiction and Authors of Color is not simply a book that recognizes and acknowledges important contributions of peoples of color in the science fiction genre (as the subtitle might indicate), but instead highlights how each text contributes to a meaningful and impactful examination of postcolonial or diasporic struggles and identities. Consequently, Sanchez-Taylor misses a golden chance to promote critical considerations of science fiction literature in more traditional ‘literary’ fields, a goal that might have been easily accomplished through minor repacking. That said, while the monograph is not overtly pitched toward postcolonial critics, it would still make a meaningful addition to a postcolonial module or courses dedicated to discussions of global literatures and identities. And, of course, it should also be on the recommended reading list for any science fiction module, as it serves as a fantastic primer for any scholar of science fiction who wishes to approach the genre with postcolonial conscientiousness.

Charul (“Chuckie”) Palmer-Patel is founder of Fantastika Journal (www.fantastikajournal.com), a journal that brings together the genres of Fantasy, Science Fiction, Gothic Horror, among others. Her first monograph, The Shape of Fantasy (Routledge 2020) investigates the narrative structures of Epic Fantasy, incorporating ideas from science, philosophy, and literary theory. The monograph has been shortlisted for the Mythopoeic Award twice. Her next research project, The Mother-Hero, interrogates power structures depicted in contemporary American Fantasy Fiction, specifically investigating the place of women within these structures. You can find out more about Palmer-Patel at www.doc-fantasy.com.

Review of Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene

Jonathan W. Thurston-Torres

Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles. Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene. Pennsylvania State UP, 2021. AnthropoScene SLSA Book Series. Cloth. 300 pg. $109.95. ISBN 9780271090214.

Ecohorror is a long-standing genre in film and literature that is both immensely popular and woefully under-analyzed by academia. Christy Tidwell and Carter Soles’s edited collection Fear and Nature: Ecohorror Studies in the Anthropocene is an attempt to remedy that dearth of scholarly criticism. What I love most about this book is the scaffolding that happens for young scholars here as well as the intellectual inquiry that naturally (pun intended) comes from many of these essays. The introduction helps to develop a language for discussing ecohorror. The early chapters work on showing the versatility of ecohorror. The later chapters showcase more specific applications of the theory earlier in the book. It is a book meant to be read from start to finish, and that is a rare treat in these edited collections. That scaffolding makes many of these topics approachable for rising scholars. And again, many of these chapters left me thinking for days and even weeks after reading. I will never see a bathroom scene in a horror film the same way again. I will never read Junji Ito without looking for an ecohorror implication. And I am confident I will have an excellent book to teach when next I teach an ecohorror lit class.

The editors spend much of the book’s introduction in defending the title. In defining “ecohorror,” a central term throughout the book, they examine the multiple ways that the book’s authors approach ecohorror: “We fear science and its attempts to control the natural world; we fear the natural world and the way it exceeds our control. We also value science as a way of understanding the world, however, and return to it repeatedly in these narratives; we value the natural world and fear its loss at least as much as we fear nonhuman nature itself” (7). Clearly, “fear and nature” have a complex relationship in ecohorror, and this book works to unpack at least some of those complexities. What is perhaps more compelling than Tidwell and Soles’s explication of ecohorror is their analysis of extant ecohorror scholarship. They examine each of the “four full-length critical works on ecohorror to date” and show the limits of those works (8). Tidwell and Soles envision Fear and Nature as adding to the discourse an “ecohorror-as-mode approach… a cross-generic and cross-media mode” (10). This interdisciplinarity is explored in four parts throughout the book. The first part, “Expanding Ecohorror,” focuses on “new types of ecohorror and seek[s] out connections between ecohorror and other types of horror” (10). The next section, “Haunted and Unhaunted Landscapes,” prioritizes readings of the environment as literary landscape in ecohorror. “The Ecohorror of Intimacy,” the third section, centers on “horror located in the home and/or family” (12). And the final part of the book, “Being Prey, Being Food,” “examines narratives of food and predation between human and nonhuman in ecohorror texts” (13). Together, these sections work to explore the boundaries of both ecohorror and ecohorror scholarship.

The first essay, “Tentacular Ecohorror and the Agency of Trees in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’ and Lorcan Finnegan’s Without Name,” by Dawn Keetley, argues that one type of ecohorror that does not get much attention is “tentacular ecohorror, which describes the terrifying encounter with a nonhuman nature that reaches out to grab and entangle the human” (24-25). She claims that the two titular works exemplify this narrative of facing alterity and the human being transformed by it. The essay excels in seating acute close reading inside comparatist contexts, comparing this kind of ecohorror to Friday the 13^th (1980) or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). The writing alone would be a great model to rising scholars.

The final essay in the section, “‘The Hand of Deadly Deca’: The Rotting Corpse, America’s Religious Tradition, and the Ethics of Green Burial in Poe’s ‘The Colloquy of Monos and Una,’” by Ashley Kniss, examines a rare example of buried-alive stories, “The Colloquy” by Poe. Kniss claims that, in its resistance of the religious resurrection narrative or typical horror of this kind of story, “The Colloquy” acts as a “mediation of the binary tension between ecophobia and ecophilia,” rather than perpetuating either in isolation (71). What I found most compelling as Kniss’s departure from Sara L. Crosby, arguing that the body’s decomposition indicates an “actual physical merger with the nonhuman Other” rather than Kniss’s claim that it signifies a “pretended merger with the other” (71). Due to the specificity of the text, however, and the lack of comparatist work, it is probably one of the least applicable or interesting-to-teach essays unless you happen to be teaching this one specific story.

The next part begins with Keri Stevenson’s “The Death of Birdsong, the Birdsong of Death: Algernon Charles Swinburne and the Horror of Erosion.” Stevenson characterizes Swinburne’s poetry of erosion as “disanthropic,” “‘distinguished [from misanthropic] by [man’s] absence from the future he envisages’” (93). As Stevenson later says, “time and the sea have destroyed only the human portions of the garden,” noting that weeds, less romanticized birds, and thorns survive easily throughout the works (97). This focus on disanthropy is productive in considering ecohorror largely, so, even though the essay lingers on one author with whom the average reader might not be familiar, the reader can walk away with useful tools for analyzing ecohorror here.

In “An Unhaunted Landscape: The Anti-Gothic Impulse in Ambrose Bierce’s ‘A Tough Tussle,’” Chelsea Davis argues that some fictional landscapes “actively refuse to absorb, echo, or respond to us,” and these “rejections might take the form of a parody, a hoax, or an empiricist dismissal of ghosts in the wilderness” (111). I immediately thought of the ways the recent film The Witch (2015) did not make these rejections; just in a few pages, Davis’ work challenges you to find examples and counterexamples. And then, she moves on to her own main case study, Bierce’s “A Tough Tussle.” Her analysis covers comparatist and historicist readings that move almost into philology and cultural studies by the end. I can easily envision teaching this chapter and this story in a class just on literary studies, as it takes from these different methodologies and weaves them together in provocative ways.

Bridgitte Barclay’s “The Extinction-Haunted Salton Sea in The Monster That Challenged the World” is the final essay in the section and focuses on the titular SF horror film. While there is not much in the way of close reading, I appreciate the interdisciplinarity of the essay, with its work in both natural history and scientific history, which advocates for a specific way of reading ecohorror that is productive. Overall, this section of the book is easily one of the strongest just because it has that interdisciplinary feel that makes it great for modeling to students and allows for multiple ways to approach ecohorror as a genre worthy of literary analysis.

The third part, focusing on “the ecohorror of intimacy,” begins with “From the Bedroom to the Bathroom: Stephen King’s Scatology and the Emergence of an Urban Environmental Gothic,” by Marisol Cortez. Definitely one of the more interesting titles in the book, this essay was also one of the more interesting ones to read. The essay begins with an in-depth defense of scatology in ecohorror studies. Cortez moves from an examination of “bathroom horror,” starting with the original film Psycho, and uses theory to back up a reading of the toilet in these kinds of films not as just a fear of generally gross things but as a fear specifically of bodily functions, what goes on inside the body, and therefore a subset of ecophobia. Cortez then takes this well-established theory and situates it within King’s It (1986) and Dreamcatcher (2001), focusing on the sewers in the former and the bathroom moments in the latter. The essay is cogent due to its structure, close reading, and practical application of theory. Despite its odd subject matter, this is an essay that will have you thinking long after reading.

Brittany R. Roberts’s “‘This Bird Made an Art of Being Vile’: Ontological Difference and Uncomfortable Intimacies in Stephen Gregory’s The Cormorant” focuses on ethical relationships and responsibilities in the titular 1986 ecohorror novel. Roberts reads into the tensions and anxieties of the novel underlying concerns about our relationships with pets. One major weakness the essay has, though, is its narrow focus. Most of the essay is in-depth close reading, and the author does not do much to try to make any takeaways applicable outside of this relatively obscure text.

The last chapter in this section is “The Shape of Water and Post-pastoral Ecohorror” by Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann. They generally provide a genre reading of del Toro’s film, explicating the ways the film blurs and blends the genres of fairy tale pastorals and horror stories. Unfortunately, the essay does not have much depth to it. The first section of the piece is background: What is the film? Why did del Toro make it? What kinds of films does del Toro generally make? Then, it moves on to a defense of what makes the film horror, then what makes it a fairy tale, and finally what makes it “post-pastoral ecohorror” (205) This last section is the most useful of the chapter, providing a new way to look at the film, “suggesting that embracing our interdependent relationships with nonhuman nature may save us all” (205). The essay as a whole felt like it had too easy or obvious of an argument, and it could have been a bit longer to give more depth to that final section.

The final section, “Being Prey, Being Food,” begins with Kristen Angierski’s “Superpig Blues: Agribusiness Ecohorror in Bong Joon-ho’s Okja.” I was immediately enchanted by Angierski’s pivotal questions about ecohorror and veganism: “What is the relationship between ecohorror, vegan studies, and critical animal studies? How can the context of the slaughterhouse productively interrogate ecohorror’s definition of resistance—of what counts” (219)? These are, of course, rather large questions, and Angierski seats them in a “close reading of the film’s arguably most emotional denunciations of factory farming” (221). However, by that point, we are already a third into the chapter, and most of what follows feels less like a close reading and more like a comparative literature reading, one second going from a close reading of a quotation from a Mirando employer to a holistic reading of the film to biological journals to Peter Singer. The close reading never dives deep enough, and it constantly zooms out to talk about larger theories and systems, and then the essay is done far too soon! There are great questions being asked here, and the theory that is brought in is useful. However, the chapter is just too short and does not engage in the quality close reading promised at the one-third mark in the chapter.

“Zoo: Television Ecohorror On and Off the Screen,” by Sharon Sharp, showcases everything that can be productive from a film studies paper. She takes on adaptation studies, reception studies, close reading, and film technology studies, all while bringing in the key theoretical aspects of animal studies and ecohorror studies. Her approach in this chapter is artful: the sections naturally weave together, so you don’t experience any theory whiplash here, and you feel very fulfilled in reading it. If—when—I teach my next ecohorror class, I’ll definitely be teaching Zoo, if only because of the case Sharp has made for it as the source of theoretical inquiry.

The book’s final essay, “Naturalizing White Supremacy in The Shallows,” by Carter Soles, deserves to have appeared far earlier in the book. It has always been a personal pet peeve of mine for editors to put the “diversity” chapters near the end of the book. (I would note though that this could have been a move on Soles’s part since he was one of the co-editors to put other authors before himself out of humility.) The chapter excels at close reading the film The Shallows in terms of the white Final Girl and the racial vision suggested by the end. The reading is thorough and left me thinking about other similar films, too. My only critique here is that Soles spends a significant amount of time comparing what was happening in this film to other non-aquatic films, such as Alien (1979), Halloween (1978), and even First Blood (1982), that it felt more circumstantial that this happened to be an ecohorror film, and that the claims made here could have applied to a number of non-ecohorror horror films. That said, I am excited to read more of Soles’ work!

For the most part, this book provides a lot of food for thought. The chapters here open up new dialogues, new ways of thinking of and analyzing ecohorror texts. The book as a whole would be an essential text for any course on ecohorror and would appeal to both undergraduate and graduate students. For the most part, too, many of the essays here would serve as great models for academic writing. This book is definitely going to be one of the more authoritative texts in the field for a while, due to its sharp, language-building introduction, the chapters’ wide applications of ecohorror theory, and the scholars’ tendency to use their work to open up conversations rather than simply proving a statement and walking away.

Jonathan W. Thurston-Torres is a PhD candidate in English and Animal Studies at Michigan State University. Their edited collection Animals & Race is coming out through MSU Press’ Animal Turn series in 2022, and they also have a chapter forthcoming in Palgrave’s Spenser and Animals. Their HIV work has appeared in TEDx, Weasel Press’ Blood Criminals, and Fenris Publishing’s HIV isn’t poetic.