9/11 Gothic: Decrypting Ghosts and Trauma in New York City’s Terrorism Novels

Published to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, 9/11 Gothic: Decrypting Ghosts and Trauma in New York City's Terrorism Novels returns to the ruins and anguish of 9/11 to pose a question not yet addressed by scholarship. World Fantasy Award-winning writer Danel Olson asks how, why, and where New York City novels captured the terror of the Al-Qaeda mass murders through a supernatural lens. This book explores ghostly presences from the world's largest crime scene in novels from Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Griffin Hansbury, to Patrick McGrath--all of whom have been called writers of Gotham. Arguing how theories on trauma and the gothic can combine to explain ghostly encounters civilian survivors experience in fiction, the author shares what those eerie meetings express about grief, guilt, mental instability, and suicidal urges. This project also explores why and how paths to recovery open for these ghost-visited survivors in some of the most catastrophic fictions from the early twenty-first century.