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Sladja Blažan, Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World in Early America (UVP, physical copy)

Cover image for Sladja Blažan, Ghosts and Their Hosts.

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Kaja Franck, The Ecogothic Werewolf in Literature: Wolves, Woods and Wilderness (Bloomsbury, physical copy)

Cover image for Kaja Franck, The Ecogothic Werewolf in Literature: Wolves, Woods and Wilderness.

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Ruth Heholt and Joanne Ella Parsons (eds), Ghosts and the Gothic (MUP, ebook)

Cover image for Ruth Heholt and Joanne Ella Parsons (eds), Ghosts and the Gothic.

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Madeline Potter, Theological Monsters: Religion and Irish Gothic (UWP, ebook)

Cover image for Madeline Potter, Theological Monsters.

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Timothy Rideout, Gothic Precarity: Fear and Anxiety in Twenty-First-Century Fiction (UWP, ebook)

Cover image for Timothy Rideout, Gothic Precarity.

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Natasha Rebry Coulthard, Gothic Mētis: Cunning Monstrosity, Shapeshifting and Subversion linking the Nineteenth Century to the Present (UWP, ebook)

Cover image for Natasha Rebry Coulthard, Gothic Mētis.

Jimmy Packham @jfpackham.bsky.social · 08/02/2026

Keith McDonald and Wayne Johnson, The Spectral West: Super-Nature and the Gothic in the Western Film (Anthem, ebook)

Cover image for Keith McDonald and Wayne Johnson, The Spectral West.

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I am very pleased we're not the only ones haunted in this way: this guy - or his extended family - at moments I'm not working when I should be... Goading me back to the desk...

Jimmy Packham @jfpackham.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

Sound but unnerving advice from the evil looking toy in our eldest’s latest party bag.

In a final commentary, Kyle Turakhia offers a lovely reflection on the ghost story workshops run with the National Literacy Trust, with school and adult learners in the West Midlands – thinking about new ghosts that might be populating the region. www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

commentary: Kyle Turakhia, 'The National Literacy Trust Haunted Birmingham Campaign: How Might 'Scary stories' Connect People to Place, Heritage and Literacy?

COMMENTARY
The National Literacy Trust Haunted Birmingham Campaign:
How Might ‘Scary stories’ Connect People to Place, Heritage
and Literacy?
Kyle Turakhia
National Literacy Trust, Birmingham, England
ABSTRACT
In the dark winter of 2023, the National Literacy Trust asked young
people and adults across Birmingham to write ‘scary stories’ set
somewhere in their home city. More than 250 residents took up
the challenge: populating local streets with monsters and ghouls,
and setting loose nightmares into their schools, shopping centres
and restaurants. In this commentary, I will introduce the National
Literacy Trust and our work in Birmingham, before explaining the
origins and delivery of the Haunted Birmingham campaign. I will
then analyse the stories submitted, exploring what emergent
themes and common settings tell us about the relevance of
‘scary stories’ to contemporary cities. Finally, I will share the results
of impact surveys measuring Haunted Birmingham and present
opportunities for readers to engage further with this work.

In the final research article, Rob Francis and Paul McDonald consider lost futures and the role of music and forms of cultural stasis in the Midlands writing of Catherine O'Flynn and Joel Lane. www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

article: Rob Francis and Paul McDonald, 'Wave Goodbye to the Future: Haunting, Music, and Cultural Stasis in the Regional Novels of Catherine O'Flynn and Joel Lane'

ABSTRACT
Using Mark Fisher’s reconfigurations of Derrida’s Hauntology, this
article explores the interactions between these narrative features
in the works of Catherine O’Flynn and Joel Lane. Fisher reworks
hauntology in relation to the distinct features of ‘futuristic’ music
and ‘retro’ perceptions of what lay ahead. He links this psychic and
cultural trap with ideas of the weird and the eerie. Both O’Flynn
and Lane have produced eerie texts set in the off-kilter and
marginal West Midlands regions, placing their characters in literal
and symbolic haunted sites. Their respective spectres – people,
places and cultures – are caught in a perpetual liminality and
psychic looping: a hauntological position. These play out through
the motifs of melancholic landscapes, personalities and cultural
currents, most notably in music. This article interrogates these
strange conjugations and interfaces that play out in the fiction
of O’Flynn and Lane.

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Thomas Knowles offers a wonderful examination of queering and melancholy in Joel Lane's West Midlands & Black Country postindustrial fiction. www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

article: Thomas Knowles, 'Queering the Postindustrial Landscape in Joel Lane's Short Fictions'

ABSTRACT
This article explores the under-examined short fiction of Joel Lane,
which is largely set in the postindustrial landscapes of the English
Midlands and the Black County. In so doing, it links Lane’s employ-
ment of the weird, the eerie, and the numinous to processes of
mourning and melancholia in the face of the unacceptable and
unacknowledgeable – by society at large – losses of the
Anthropocene, of industrial decline, and of the HIV AIDS crisis. It
argues that Lane’s queering of mourning and melancholia offers
modes of resistance to the recuperation of radical losses and the
transformation of storied place into homogenous space.

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In my piece, I think about what the Midlands and its canal network can offer blue humanities scholarship, via case studies of Robert Aickman, Elizabeth Jane Howard, and LTC Rolt. www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

article: Jimmy Packham, 'Weird Waterways: Blue Humanities and Eerie Canals in the Midlands'

ABSTRACT
This article explores the eerie and uncanny qualities asso-
ciated with the Midlands canal network, with particular focus
on the gothic and weird fiction produced by three writers:
Robert Aickman, Elizabeth Jane Howard, and L. T. C. Rolt. The
article redresses the neglect canals have faced within the
field of study known as the blue humanities and argues for
the distinctive – and haunting – forms of affect and knowl-
edge that canals can bring to humanities scholarship
invested in bodies of water and their histories. Because of
the extensive size of its canal network, the Midlands makes
an excellent case study for establishing the role of the canal
in the blue humanities. At the same time, the article argues
for the value of apprehending the Midlands, particularly
Birmingham and the surrounding region, as a richly aqueous
or ‘blue’ space, a region saturated and shaped by its inland
waterways.

Then, Scott Brewster examines the connections between Bram Stoker's Lair of the White Worm and the folk horror film Penda's Fen, via their shared interest in Mercia and questions of belonging, hybridity, and insiders/outsiders. www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

article: Scott Brewster, 'Mercian Charms: From The Lair of the White Worm to Penda's Fen'

ABSTRACT
This essay traces the unlikely affinities between Bram Stoker’s novel
The Lair of the White Worm (1911) and David Rudkin’s television play
Penda’s Fen (1974), showing how both involve the mythopoeic rein-
vention of Anglo-Saxon Mercia as a heartland of visionary change.
These texts resist alien beliefs and defend territorial integrity, but also
extend a welcome to outsiders or incomers. Stoker and Rudkin turn
the storied landscape of ancient Mercia into a crucible of difference,
a sinuous entanglement or coiling of hybrid origins and affiliations.
Their narratives constitute intense meditations on nation and belong-
ing at different moments of imperial and post-imperial uncertainty in
the twentieth century, when the continuity of Englishness as an
identity formation is challenged by shifting relationships within and
beyond the British and Irish Isles. Whereas The Lair of the White Worm
seeks to delimit the transformative power of these middle lands,
however, Penda’s Fen unleashes its potential.

Next, Nicola Bowring explores the centrality of Nottinghamshire, especially Newstead Abbey, to the early gothic tradition: looking at Walpole, Radcliffe, Byron and Irving. www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

article: Nicola Bowring, 'Recapturing History: Newstead Abbey and Romantic-Gothic Interpretation'

ABSTRACT
Newstead Abbey, in Nottinghamshire, is widely known as the
ancestral home of the Romantic poet Lord Byron. Its connections
to Romantic-era literature and its influence on the early Gothic
tradition, however, run much further than this. Horace Walpole,
the ‘father’ of the Gothic genre, Ann Radcliffe, ‘mother’ of the
Gothic romance, and Washington Irving, a key figure in the rise
of the American Gothic, all visited the abbey, which inspired their
Gothic tastes and writing. This essay explores their connections to
this East Midlands site, arguing for its significance to the Gothic
tradition. Newstead helped to cement what would become one of
the key themes of Gothic fiction: engagement with the past and
history through material remains, primarily the written text and
the ancient building. The Nottinghamshire abbey thus played a
key role in the development of the Gothic tradition in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The first research article by Imogen Peck is on the ghosts of Britain's Civil Wars and their place in the Midlands as well as the gothic literature and spiritualism. www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

article: Imogen Peck, 'Edgehill, Naseby, and the Ghosts of the Civil Wars'

ABSTRACT
This article explores the shifting significance of the spectres of
Britain’s Civil Wars from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth
century. Focusing on the supernatural stories that have adhered
to various Midlands sites, and to the battlefields at Edgehill and
Naseby in particular, it illuminates the ways in which the ghosts of
Britain’s domestic conflicts have been used to interrogate and
express contemporary anxieties about the impact and aftermath
of conflict across several centuries. In so doing, it draws attention
to the significant – but often overlooked – role that the Civil Wars
have played in the Gothic tradition. It also establishes the signifi-
cance of Midlands sites as loci of Civil War memory, engendering a
multi-layered reading of land and memory in which spectres of
war, both past and present, might enter into dialogue over the
meaning of conflict and the enduring presence of the past.

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The Introduction to the special issue does some critical set-up around gothic regionalism and the Midlands, mostly via short close readings of 6 key authors –and the Commonwealth Games... www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Introduction: Towards the Haunted Midlands by Jimmy Packham

ABSTRACT
The English Midlands is home to a rich and distinctive gothic tradi-
tion: vast landscapes with nebulous borders disorient the traveller
spatially as well as temporally, the unsettled legacies of ancient
Mercia seep into the present day, and the ghosts – and ecological
repercussions – of industrialisation haunt regions such as the Black
Country. Yet this cultural tradition is largely underexplored. This
introduction to the ‘Haunted Midlands’ special issue of Midland
History begins to elaborate the ways in which the Midlands can be
productively placed within, and complicate, critical frameworks asso-
ciated with regionalist literary studies. It does so with specific refer-
ence to a selection of key Midlands gothic texts, all of which evidence
a fascination with place, placelessness, and the relationship between
the Midlands and the nation of which it forms a significant part.

Jimmy Packham @jfpackham.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

Project Servator — seemingly run by the animorphs

A yellow sign that reads: PROJECT
SERVATOR. Together we've got security covered. To help keep this area safe, we run regular

000

Jimmy Packham @jfpackham.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

But then in the snow all of this nonsense erupts…

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Jimmy Packham @jfpackham.bsky.social · 29/11/2024

Ours did an exceptional job of this over the summer whenever it got slightly warm. This is, despite appearances, a video…