Profile of: Michael Thorn

Award Received: SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship - Doctoral

Awarded for the project: Pessimystic and Weirding the Gothic: Depictions of Writing in Numinous Dark Literature

Faculty: Arts

Department: English

Supervisor: Dr. Elizabeth Effinger

We live in times of acute anxiety and awe-inspiring unknowability. How can Gothic and Weird literature, with their historic focuses on the act of writing, help express the emotional and psychological excesses of contemporary existence?

My doctoral novel, Pessimystic, explores the tension between Gothic darkness and Weird wonder. It follows a thirty-two-year-old writer named Robert, who inherits his publishing mogul aunt Matilda’s heritage manor after her publicly scrutinized downfall and mysterious death. Situated on the outskirts of a fictional New Brunswick town called Hollow Stone, Matilda’s manor slowly reveals to Robert its esteemed original owner’s cruel secrets. Meanwhile, Robert makes acquaintance with fellow Hollow Stone writers, who introduce him to a mystic site called Blackwood Cave, where vaporous beings called Anouminals offer writers inspirational visions in exchange for minute extractions of their lifeforce. As my novel charges toward its horrific conclusion, the past and present collide with devastating consequences.

My book hybridizes elements of the Gothic tradition (e.g. Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King) with the aesthetics of Weird fiction (e.g. H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Frank Belknap Long, and Kathe Koja). My accompanying critical introduction situates Pessimystic within these literary traditions, specifically investigating the ways that Gothic and Weird fiction have historically depicted writers and the act of writing. As reflected in its punning title, Pessimystic expresses the psychological darkness of pessimism and the wondrousness of mystic experience. Through my novel and its introduction, I aim to represent both the subjective experience of the unknown (as in the Gothic) and the unknown itself (as in the Weird), and to demonstrate how the act of writing erodes the barrier between the two.