Anxieties around stable and unified human subjectivity, and the related emergence of a transformative or transformed abhuman, are central to gothic criticism. However, this approach takes the European male, universalised through Enlightenment humanism, as its normative subject, with (some) women, colonised others, and non-human nature as, therefore, abhuman and the epitome of the abject. This fcritiques the primitivist underpinnings of European constructions of the human, abject and the abhuman, and exposes plural modes of being evident in a world-gothic analysis of The Icarus Girl (Oyeyemi) and Freshwater (Emezi).