Savage Horrors

The American Gothic novel has been deeply shaped by issues of race and raciality from its origins in British Romanticism to the American Gothic novel in the twenty-first century. Savage Horrors delineates an intrinsic raciality that is discursively sedimented in the Gothic's uniquely binary structure. Corinna Lenhardt uncovers the destructive and lasting impact of the Gothic's anti-Black racism on the cultural discourses in the United States. At the same time, Savage Horrors traces the unflinching Black resistance back to the Gothic's intrinsic raciality. The African American Gothic, however, does not originate there but in the Black Atlantic - roughly a decade before the first Gothic novel was ever written on American soil.

SAVAGE Whitechapel, November 1888: Jack the Ripper is committing his last known act of butchery in the one-room hovel occupied by the luckless harlot, Mary Kelly. And beneath the bed on which the fiend is cruelly and cheerfully eviscerating his victim cowers a fifteen-year-old boy... This is just the start of the extraordinary adventures of Trevor Bently, a boy who embarked on a errand of mercy and ran into the most notorious serial killer in criminal history, a boy who became a man as he travelled on a quest of vengeance across a wild and untamed continent - a boy who brought the horrors of Jack the Ripper to the New World. IN THE DARK Nothing much happens in Donnerville, at least not in the public library. Then the new librarian, Jane Kerry, receives a strange envelope. Inside is a fifty-dollar bill and a note instructing her to 'Look homeward, angel.'Mystified, Jane pulls Thomas Wolfe's novel of that title off the shelf and finds a second envelope. This one contains a one-hundred dollar bill and a clue to another pay-off. Like the first one it is signed 'MOG (Master of Games)'. Suddenly Jane is hooked, this is one game she must play to the end.

"If you've missed Laymon, you've missed a treat." --Stephen King Whitechapel, November 1888: Jack the Ripper is committing his last known murder and beneath the bed on which he's butchering his victim cowers a fifteen-year-old boy. So begin the adventures of Trevor Bentley: a boy who embarked on an errand of mercy and ended up on a quest for vengeance, a boy who will bring the horrors of the Ripper to the New World.