Monday, October 13, 7:30 P.M. CT
Zoom link will go to members via email

October’s lecture focuses on the recurrent trope of monstrous fungi in recent horror fiction, with a particular focus on its ecological and political significance. While stories of fungal horror first germinated as far back as the early twentieth century with William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” (1907), fungal horror has recently propagated through a range of texts and other media, from literature to video games to films and television. Tracing several of tendrils of the mycelial Gothic through recent horror texts, our speaker Jonathan Newell suggests that monstrous fungi incarnate anxieties around environmental decay while simultaneously imagining the possibilities of a post-human future.

Jonathan Newell is an instructor at snəw̓eyəɬ leləm̓ Langara College. His work focuses on weird, Gothic, and horror fiction and the intersections between affect, metaphysics, ecology, and politics. He received his PhD in English Literature from the University of British Columbia in 2017. He is the author of A Century of Weird Fiction, 1832-1937: Disgust, Metaphysics, and the Aesthetics of Cosmic Horror, published by the University of Wales Press. His research has been published in Horror Studies, Studies in Gothic Fiction, Studies in the Fantastic, and Science Fiction Studies.