Gothic Imagination

"John C. Tibbetts' wild and exuberant anthology of interviews will certainly test your synapses as well as your literary prejudices." - From the preface by Richard Holmes"Our literature starts with a vision of blackness, and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that our country at first was mostly untamable forest. There were truly bad things out there. Now, we don't want to have that. We want to believe in the surface of things...But I think daily life is still filled with uncertainty, anxiety, and fear. Nobody's life is really safe." - Interview with Peter Straub "What I want to do is use a scientific theory to give you experiences you've never had before...like ghosts you've never seen before, in contexts that you've never really experienced. [With] an underpinning and a mythos to what you're seeing that it almost makes sense, and that's what provides the scare." - Interview with Greg Bear The Gothic tradition continues to excite the popular imagination. John C. Tibbetts presents interviews and conversations with prominent novelists, filmmakers, artists, and film and television directors and actors as they trace the Gothic mode across three centuries, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, through H.P. Lovecraft, to today's science fiction, goth, and steampunk culture. H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Ray Bradbury, Robert (Psycho) Bloch, Chris (The Polar Express) Van Allsburg, Maurice Sendak, Gahan Wilson, Ray Harryhausen, Christopher Reeve, Greg Bear, William Shatner, and many more share their worlds of imagination and terror.