This chapter examines how cheap, handy, and accessible print formats facilitated the growth and development of American genre writing throughout the twentieth century. From horror stories to science fiction, popular genres took root in pulpwood magazines targeting working-class male readers who lived in industrialized areas. Paperback books became the primary format by which genre writing was marketed to a mass readership. Whether in magazine or book form, the appeal of pulp fiction may be attributed to the serial plots and sensationalized storytelling that came along with ephemeral print media. But it also may be attributed to their masculinist perspectives and racial and ethnic stereotyping narrative strategies that reinforced the prejudices of its presumed readership of white men. The chapter tracks the representation of anti-Asian and anti-Black sentiment in pulp fiction from the early twentieth century to the Black Power era. It explains how such sentiment reflected nativist and imperialist ideologies of difference, and it ends with a consideration of how writers of color have sought to diversify popular genres by writing against the pulp traditions they have inherited.

This chapter shows how, from Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly to Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum, American horror erupts out of the violence performed on indigenous people by white settler society, on people and land on the slavery plantation, and on citizens in the Global South and Middle East during period when the United States has extended and protected American global hegemony. By reading American colonialism and neo-imperialism as central to American extractivist capitalism, the chapter reveals how American horror also narrates the devastating violence done to the planet itself. The chapter observes that much American horror produced by and for white settler society represents settler violence against people and land as justified and regenerative, but it also discusses a number of less reactionary texts that make plain the horrific violence inherent in the capitalist colonial project.

This chapter examines Gothic versions of apocalypse in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Apocalypse in its biblical forms is associated both with divine revelation and with the imagining of social and political transformation. Gothic apocalypses adopt the visionary and revelatory aspects of biblical apocalypse, but do so in order to imagine bleak futures, whether in the cosmic chaos of Weird fiction or in the more secular-materialist anxieties of political corruption, nuclear destruction, or economic and environmental collapse. The returned dead of Gothic fictions hint at the resurrected body in Christian eschatology, but here emptied of redemptive possibility: the body returns not in the likeness of the risen Christ, but in the monstrous form of the zombie, vampire or revenant. Yet if Gothic apocalypses often depict the dehumanisation of the human and the collapse of the modern political and economic order, their visions of catastrophe also open space for the exploration of new ways of being on the other side of the end. Confronting contemporary anxieties around ecological destruction and economic crisis, Gothic apocalypses in the twenty-first century offer tentative glimpses of renewal in a remade world.