This is a necessary book. The result of close reading, broad research and personal engagement, it revises our ideas of the relations between narrative and disaster, focussing on 9/11 but in ways that make it apposite to so many other aspects of troubled times. Well-written and vivid, it provides a complex picture of how writers and other people deal with the sudden appearance of trauma in our midst.

Professor David Punter, Department of English, University of Bristol, UK

Danel Olson is one of the most incisive, intelligent and elegant of writers on the contemporary gothic. In his analysis of the fiction that appeared in the aftermath of 9/11, he shows both a profound sensitivity to the trauma of the event, and to the efforts of those writers most immediately affected by it to express that trauma. This is the definitive account of the gothic imagination in its collective response to an almost unimaginable real-life horror. A very fine piece of work, which will surely be of lasting importance to gothic scholars.

Patrick McGrath, novelist