9/11 Gothic: Decrypting Ghosts and Trauma in New York City’s Terrorism Novels

by Danel Olson

Published to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, 9/11 Gothic: Decrypting Ghosts and Trauma in New York City’s Terrorism Novels returns to the ruins and anguish of 9/11 to pose a question not yet addressed by scholarship. Two time World Fantasy Award-winning writer Danel Olson asks how, why, and where New York City novels capture the terror of the Al-Qaeda mass murders through a supernatural lens. This book explores ghostly presences from the world’s largest crime scene in novels by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Griffin Hansbury, and Patrick McGrath—all of whom have been called writers of Gotham. Arguing how theories on trauma and the Gothic can combine to explain ghostly encounters civilian survivors experience in fiction, Olson shares what those eerie meetings express about grief, guilt, love, memory, sex, and suicidal urges. This book also explores why and how paths to recovery open for these ghost-visited survivors in the fiction of catastrophe from the early twenty-first century.

230 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2021

Reviews

[Octavia Cade · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three and a half stars, rounding up to four. First, I have to admit, of the five novels analysed here I have read precisely none, so my reaction is likely coloured by that. On the one hand I wonder if I might have found it a little more compelling if I were familiar with the source material, but on the other... I'm not honestly sure that I want to read the source material. Most of it sounds unpleasant. Which is absolutely the point, as novels about 9/11 are hardly likely to be easy reads, but the only one I think I'd consider picking up is Lynne Sharon Schwartz's The Writing on the Wall. Olson has articulated well why he thinks critical reaction to these novels has been less than satisfactory, and he is convincing in his arguments, but still...

Even with my ignorance, though, parts of this were fascinating. I kind of changed my mind on it partway through, as I'm used to my ghost stories being a little more overt in their ghostliness, whereas a lot of what Olson is talking about here is Gothic trauma and how it nudges up against the supernatural, and not always in expected ways. Once I stopped thinking about this as a critical exploration of very-little-ghosts and started thinking of it as an exploration of the destabilising effects of trauma (which is probably what the author intended) I started to get a lot more interested. The actual phenomenon of survivors taking on attributes of the dead, in their mannerisms and behaviour, for instance, is an example of this, producing an amalgamation that's arguably part doppelganger and part possession, which is a genuinely fascinating take. The whole is clearly well-researched and for the most part clearly written, not over-burdened with academic prose, which is also a bonus.

It should be said that I received a free e-copy of this book for voting purposes in the Bram Stoker awards. I was glad to get it, and it seems churlish to complain, but I think it's fair to say that the version I received had yet to be copy-edited. It loses half a point for that. I suspect this will be fixed in the final version.