I have a new chapter out!
To be honest, it’s not really new. It came out last year and I missed it. Oh well, better late than never. “Sterility Across Chasms: Dead Worlds and Technological Imaginations in Meredith Ann Pierce’s Darkangel Series” is available to read in Lunar Gothic: The Influence of the Moon on the Gothic Imagination from Palgrave Macmillan, edited by Elana Gomel and Simon Bacon.
When I saw the call for papers for this, which really was years ago at this point – academic publishing is notoriously slow – I knew at once that I wanted to submit something. Lunar Gothic? That was too exciting to pass up. There was really only one choice of text for me, too.
I was obsessed with the Darkangel series as a kid. I can’t tell you how many times I took it out of the school library. It was vampires! On the moon! And the central romance fell apart because it turns out it doesn’t matter if you (literally) offer up your heart to a prince, he doesn’t have to love you for it and it doesn’t make him a bad person, it just means you get to transfer your previously rather limited ambitions to (literal) worldbuilding instead. The drama! The imagery! The dead Earth, hanging in the sky while gargoyles roamed a creepy lunar castle and a whole series of brides got their blood drained and hung around afterwards, whining. (To be fair, in their place I’d whine too.) Death! Rebirth! Fantastical creatures and artificial life!
That trilogy was weird as hell and I loved every page of it. Because I mostly write academic papers on my own time – it’s the world’s nerdiest hobby – I end up writing a lot about my favourite things and pieces of media over the years. And why not, I say. Any excuse to reread this series is a good one. And Gothic really can go anywhere…
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