American Gothic Culture is the latest instalment in the ongoing Edinburgh University Press's Companions to the Gothic series, and as such represents a timely and worthwhile addition to the rapidly expanding canon of critical works on the topic, alongside Charles L. Crow's A Companion to American Gothic (2013), Allan Lloyd Smith's American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction (2004), and the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to the American Gothic. This volume is intended to further “demonstrate the centrality of the gothic to American culture writ large,” and as such begins by persuasively, if familiarly, arguing that “definitions of America and those of the gothic are so closely related as to be inseparable” (2).

It features twelve chapters on texts and contexts from across the ever-widening spectrum of American Gothic studies, beginning with Christina Yao's discussion of the trope of the bestial Indian in eighteenth-century literature, and ending with Linnie Blake's examination of the twenty-first-century zombie narrative. In between, we have consistently illuminating and engaging discussions of topics such as slavery (Jason Haslam), American Gothic television (Julia M. Wright), the southern Gothic (Christopher Lloyd), the American urban Gothic (Andrew Loman), American vampires (Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock), Gothic art (Christoph Grunenberg), the serial-killer narrative (Sorcha Ní Fhlainn), Gothic video games (Michael Hancock), the “schoolhouse Gothic” (Sherry R. Truffin), and a particularly intriguing discussion of the ways in which the Gothic has recently been deployed by Native American and minority writers (Arthur Redding).

The introduction begins, as many previous works on the American Gothic have (and perhaps must begin), by evoking the utopian desire for a newer, “better” world that drives so many American fantasies (and, of course, also lends itself to consideration of the dystopian flip side to the American dream, the American nightmare). On this occasion, it is three architectural sites most associated with one of the twentieth century's most influential shapers of the American self, Walt Disney, which serve as a resonant starting point. All of them, we are told, “stand in for a particular aspect of the American dream,” but like this fantasy, “all three Disney sites are haunted, undermined by the realisation of their hollowness, of violence, of death” (1). This resonant disparity between the “superficial perfection and happiness and the partially hidden realities behind them” prompts the editors to ask whether Disneyland could even be considered “the most gothic site in the whole of America?” (1).

As it happens, in the same week that I am writing this review, the world is still coming to terms with the impact of the unprecedented act of mass murder that has taken place in Orlando, Florida, a city many people will previously have most associated yet another Disney site, Disneyworld. Events such as this, along with the protracted unfolding of a dangerously unpredictable presidential race, and the ongoing feeling of economic and environmental malaise, only intensify what is, for many, the pervasive sense that the United States in the twenty-first century is in the grip of a perpetual and ever-escalating national crisis with no clear end in sight (it is no surprise that Donald Trump's simultaneously nebulous yet decisive campaign slogan is “Make America Great Again!”).

This same sense of crisis is ably identified in many of the essays featured here, and in particular those that deal with more contemporary texts and tropes, such as Blake's lively consideration of contemporary zombie narratives (and, in particular, Max Brook's World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (2006)), Ní Fhlainn's discussion of the serial-killer narrative, and Michael Hancock's meditation on the neoliberal resonances of the sense of repetition that forms an inherent part of the video-gaming experience. And yet, as earlier entries by the likes of Yao, Haslam, Lloyd and Loman suggest, if this collection underlines anything, it is that from the very first European encounters with North America there has been a sense of profound unease in the air, much of it also percolating around issues of race, gender, religion and class.

The introduction provides an engaging and practical overview of the historical and cultural origins of the American Gothic, as well as its core critical contexts, and as such will be particularly useful for students and educators looking for a succinct and reliable survey of the field's critical terrain. The volume as a whole also provides an intriguing and up-to-date snapshot of this increasingly important area within American studies more generally. The chapters featured within certainly support the editor's view of “the gothic as a primary discourse through which American culture discusses itself and the material nation from which it arises” (17). In short, there will be something of interest here for anyone with even the slightest interest in the strain of darkness that has percolated through American culture since the first European explorers laid claim to a simultaneously enticing and terrifying land that was not their own.