"In this innovative re-casting of the genre and its received canon, Emily Horton explores fictional investments in the Gothic within contemporary British literature, revealing how such concepts as the monstrous, spectral and uncanny work to illuminate the insecure, uneven and precarious experience of 21st century life. Reading contemporary works of Gothic fiction by Helen Oyeyemi, Kazuo Ishiguro, Sarah Moss, Patrick McGrath and M.R. Carey alongside writers not previously grouped under this umbrella, such as Brian Chikwava, Chloe Aridjis and Mohsin Hamid, Horton illuminates the way the Gothic has been engaged and reread by these contemporary writers to address the many cultural anxieties invoked living under neocolonial and neoliberal governance, including terrorism, migration, homelessness, racism, and climate change. Marshalling new modes of diasporic and cross-disciplinary critical theory concerned with the violent dimensions of contemporary life, this book sets the Gothic aesthetics in such works as White is for Witching, Double Vision, Never Let Me Go, The Wasted Vigil and Ghost Wall against a backdrop of key events in the 21st century. Drawing connections between moments of anxiety, such as 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, ecological disaster, the refugee crisis, Brexit, the pandemic, and the Gothic, Horton demonstrates how British literature mediates transnational experiences of trauma and horror, while also addressing local and national insecurities and preoccupations. As a result, 21st century British Gothic can be seen to test geographical, psychological, cultural, and aesthetic borders, as it seeks to expose an often spectralised experience of human and planetary vulnerability, and as it speaks back against the brutality of global capitalism"--