You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

My guest this afternoon is Patrick McGraw, who has recently published the novel Spider in

paperback from Vintage, and an anthology called The New Gothic, a collection of contemporary

gothic fiction.

Now, I want to begin by raking you over the calls a little bit, not because I'm hostile, but because it might be fun. But this doesn't seem really to be very new Gothic at all.

It seems to me to be a combination of Stephen King and Robert Koover, and they've been publishing

in Koover's case for at least 30 years, Kings, 15 or 20.

What's new about this new Gothic?

The idea is a fairly simple one, and we're not claiming to be breaking fresh ground in genre theory or anything like that.

But our idea was that the old Gothic was characterized by sets and settings

that very easily identified the tripping cellars and the haunted houses and so forth.

And that at a certain point, the Gothic began to transmute and become more interested in psychological states.

And so those writers who today are interested in transgression, in psychological disturbance, in extremes of human experience, we would say, are still working in,

with some sort of continuity from the time of the work of Po, let's say, and thus can be

classified as gothicists to the extent that they do share those sorts of interests that Poe, you know,

so worked with. Having been a person who suffered horribly through Anne Radcliffe's, the Italian,

and many of these books, including the monk, which is not, I'm

afraid, what one hopes it will be when one, you know, first hears about it. It seems to me that

...