Gothic War on Terror: Killing, Haunting, and PTSD in American Film, Fiction, Comics, and Video Games (Palgrave Gothic). This item is unavailable.Gothic War on Terror: Killing, Haunting, and PTSD in American Film, Fiction, Comics, and Video Games (Palgrave Gothic)

After 9/11, the world felt the “shock and awe” of the War on Terror. But that war also exploded inside novels, films, comics, and gaming. Danel Olson investigates why the paranormal, ghostly, and conspiratorial entered such media between 2002-2022, and how this Gothic presence connects to the most recent theories on PTSD. Set in New York/Gotham, Afghanistan, Iraq, and CIA black sites, the traumatic and weird works interrogated here ask how killing affects the killers. The protagonists probed are artillery, infantry, and armored-cavalry soldiers; military intelligence; the Air Force; counter-terrorism officers of the NYPD, NCIS, FBI, and CIA; and even the ultimate crime-fighting vigilante, Batman.

Danel Olson is Professor of film, argument, and literature at Lone Star College, Houston, Texas, USA. He has edited twelve books on fiction and film including 21st Century Gothic (2010), The Shining: Studies in the Horror Film (2015), and Writing Madness: Short Fiction of Patrick McGrath (2018).