The Earth Is a Haunted House

“Tom Hilliard has observed that the first American literature was gothic literature, rooted in a Puritan fear of unfamiliar wilderness, and Bernice Murphy argues that contemporary American narratives are haunted by the “wilderness-that-was” — persistent fears about the landscape, however changed it may be”

“The monster in horror is almost always a metaphor, right? Here, it’s a metaphor for the consequences of man’s sins against the natural world”

“here we are, talking about the whole of the earth as a crumbling Gothic structure”