The contemporary London Gothic and the limits of the 'spectral turn'

This essay explores the resurgence, in the 1980s and 1990s, of Gothic fictions based in London, a cycle of fictions that stretches from mainstream writers such as Peter Ackroyd to the popular fictions of the horror writers Christopher Fowler and Neil Gaiman and the avant-garde works of Iain Sinclair and Stewart Home. One of the most tempting ways to examine this resurgence is through the parallel theoretical turn to 'spectres' and 'spectrality', as developed by numerous literary critics in the wake of Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx (1994). The essay questions the limits of invoking a generalized structure of 'haunted modernity'. Instead it argues that the contemporary London Gothic is the product of the mix of tyranny and farce that constitutes the history of democratic London governance - a context symptomatically ignored in recent 'spectral' accounts of the Gothic.