A Fiction of Global Terror

Timothy Rideout’s new book shows how precarity among the middle and working classes powers the fears at the heart of 21st-century gothic literature.

By Tracy Fernandez RysavyFebruary 19, 2026

• Literary Criticism

• Economics and Finance

• SF

IN NOVEMBER 2025, Tesla shareholders approved a stock-compensation package for Elon Musk that could make him the world’s first trillionaire within the next decade. At the same time, every day brings more bad news for the middle and working classes, from cuts to affordable healthcare and consumer protection programs here in the United States to ever-escalating threats of war, violence, and random arrest, detention, and torture around the world.

Simultaneously, gothic literature is now more popular than ever, with works by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Tananarive Due, Stephen Graham Jones, and others regularly appearing on bestseller lists. According to Timothy Rideout, author of Gothic Precarity: Fear and Anxiety in Twenty-First-Century Fiction (2025), this is no coincidence: “[T]he Gothic resonates with the real-world terrors of the current global landscape,” he writes, and it reconfigures such terrors in the symbolic forms of ghosts, vampires, and unspeakable things that go bump in the night.

It’s no wonder that today’s gothic writers engage with the terrors that are increasingly impossible to ignore in our hyperconnected society. As the Musks of the world multiply their riches using an economic system built on sustaining itself through growth, television and the internet blare constant warnings that that growth must end. One planet can’t sustain an infinitely expanding population where goods and services infinitely expand with it. Meanwhile, companies exploit workers and the environment so millionaire and billionaire shareholders can reap higher dividends. What will happen—what is happening—includes toxic environmental damage, extreme weather events caused by a warming climate, wars fought over control of dwindling resources, draconian anti-migrant policies, and widespread economic instability. In a word, an increasing number of people not insulated by piles of wealth are experiencing precarity, an ever-growing sense of teetering on the brink of catastrophe. And they’re experiencing it on multiple fronts—social, economic, and political—while the planet itself tips toward eco-collapse.

Rideout lays this phenomenon at the feet of neoliberal policies that started to emerge in the 1930s and gained ascendance during the 1970s and ’80s. These policies were aimed at creating and sustaining a free market and free trade agreements largely unfettered by labor and environmental safeguards, along with strong private-property laws that valued vast accumulation of wealth and resources over the common good, while unraveling government-funded social safety net programs.

The omnipresent precarity among the middle and working classes powers the fears at the heart of 21st-century gothic literature, Rideout argues. In fact, he writes, “of all literary modes, it is the Gothic that is best placed to engage with and expose neoliberal precarity.” To prove that point, his monograph features gothic texts from around the world, examining “key manifestations of precarity, including war, economics, the plight of migrants and refugees, and the climate crisis,” in light of the neoliberal policies that engendered each. The stories Rideout centers take a modern tack: instead of further oppressing or monsterizing women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, and other populations traditionally marginalized by the gothic and by neoliberal policies, these multiethnic works offer counternarratives of resistance.

One chapter looks at the precarity caused by war, as depicted in Ahmed Saadawi’s 2013 novel Frankenstein in Baghdad. Like the novel that inspired it, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Saadawi’s work features a monster assembled from parts—this time by a junk dealer scavenging the bodies of victims of the Iraq War. Unlike Shelley’s creature, Saadawi’s monster, Whatsitsname, hemorrhages pieces of itself as it moves through Baghdad’s war-torn landscape, reflecting the fear and insecurity experienced throughout the Iraqi homeland.

Launched in 2003, the US “shock and awe doctrine” ratcheted up that fear and insecurity exponentially for Iraqi civilians, notes Rideout, as it “coopt[ed] terrorism as a core element of a neoliberal approach to war.” Rather than confine operations to military targets, the United States would now deploy “psychological and intangible, as well as physical and concrete effects beyond the destruction of enemy forces and supporting military infrastructure.” That infliction of terror on civilian populations, as depicted in Frankenstein in Baghdad, invokes the gothic mode, Rideout argues, even more than the monster at the heart of Saadawi’s tale.

Where Shelley’s creature is animated by a mysterious “spark of being,” Whatsitsname achieves sentience when a security guard is killed by an exploding truck bomb, causing his newly bodiless soul to enter the piecemeal corpse lying nearby. At first, Whatsitsname is driven by revenge against those who harmed the people whose body parts make up his whole; however, he soon begins targeting victims indiscriminately. Each act of violence, whether random or driven by vengeance, results in one of his body parts falling away. The losses underscore the meaninglessness of his aggression and the constant state of precarity in which he and the civilians around him are steeped. Soon, his need for replacement parts eclipses his desire for revenge as the motivation for his murderous rampages. Rideout argues that Whatsitsname is “fully aligned” with the causes of the Iraq War posited by Naomi Klein in her 2007 book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism—belying claims of national security concerns, “the architects of the invasion had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means.” In other words, for both Saadawi’s creature and the Bush 43 administration, purer (or, at least, more understandable) motives give way to a greed that consumes all in its path.

Rideout treads familiar ground by invoking gothic concepts like Sigmund Freud’s uncanny, viewing them through his lens of precarity. Freud positioned the uncanny (“unheimlich” in German) as that which is both familiar and unsettling at the same time. Key to Freud’s definition, Rideout notes, is the idea that the uncanny represents “everything that was meant to remain secret and hidden and has come into the open,” or the return of that which was repressed. The Iraq War, he says, repressed “everything that comprised the Iraqi people’s identity,” intending to leave behind a new neoliberal order that was a pale, “faux-heimlich” shadow. But instead, modern Baghdad is “unheimlich to its core,” symbolized by the monster’s patchwork, cadaverous, disassembling body. Like the monster, Iraq’s past and the United States’ true motives for invading the country refuse to remain hidden.

Surrounding chapters offer comprehensive explorations of other gothic stories that detail and allegorize the horrors of precarity, including precarity under totalitarian regimes, among migrants and refugees, and in the face of the climate crisis. One standout section looks at economic precarity as depicted in the Mexican setting of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s 2016 vampire novel Certain Dark Things, comparing it to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). In Rideout’s analysis, the 10 classes of vampires in Moreno-Garcia’s novel represent the greed and terror at the heart of Mexico’s modern economy, created by neoliberal policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA liberalized trade across the US-Mexican border while instigating a race to the bottom for worker salaries and environmental protections, along with weakening social programs. The resultant financial crisis saw the dismantling of Mexico’s agriculture sector and the subsequent rise of narco-terrorism as the drug trade replaced bankrupted family farms.

The vampires in Certain Dark Things, Rideout argues, represent both the greed of the corrupt government officials who enact harmful neoliberal policies and the brutality of the drug lords who maintain a stranglehold on the country’s economy. Meanwhile, everyday citizens experience the harsh economic precarity of the novel’s protagonist Domingo, a scrappy street kid who scavenges through trash in Mexico City’s dumps. Isolated and lonely, Domingo befriends Atl, a member of a vampire clan descended from the Aztecs. Atl is hunted by a cartel kingpin from a particularly vicious European vampire clan called the Necros, adding a layer of colonization to the dynamic mix. Atl returns some of Domingo’s affection even though their relationship is likely doomed, given that she alternates between enjoying his company and wanting to consume his blood. She is the embodiment of both precolonial folklore and modern monstrous consumption, Rideout argues, and the inherent conflict between these identities reflects her position in a complex, economically precarious system “defined by […] uncertainty.”

Rideout compares Moreno-Garcia’s vampires to Stoker’s Dracula, noting that, while both exploit the vulnerable to satisfy their appetites, Moreno-Garcia’s villainous Necro vampires more than double the Count’s greed. “[W]here Dracula is a leech,” Rideout argues, Necro vampire Nick Godoy “is a shark, his ‘serrated teeth’ able to savage and tear a victim’s ‘skin like it was papier-mâché.’” Godoy and the other Necros represent the “primal savagery” and “lust for power” that drive the worst 21st-century neoliberal policies.

In case it’s not already obvious, Gothic Precarity is predicated on at least a moderately left-leaning point of view; there’s no embrace of Reaganesque trickle-down economic policies or repressive Trump-era crackdowns on undocumented immigrants here. But whatever one’s personal politics, it would be hard to argue against the idea that the 21st century has birthed a whole new class of citizens around the world. Members of the “precariat” struggle not only to buy a home or start a small business but even to keep a roof over their heads and meet basic needs—while ever-increasing threats of violence loom.

Gothic Precarity deftly makes the case that the gothic genre in the 21st century most accurately reflects the pressing economic, environmental, and social threats of our time, as well as the sense of dread they engender in those of us who aren’t part of the one percent. Rideout’s approach, while occasionally repetitive within chapters, is comprehensively researched and exquisitely detailed, and his welcome inclusion of multiethnic texts from around the world rightfully underscores that precarity is very much a global issue.

It’s never easy to contemplate the worst problems we face as a global society. I once interviewed economist Bernard Lietaer, who studied global monetary systems and co-designed the convergence mechanism that allowed the European Union to adopt the euro as a single currency. We conversed at length about the overall sickness of our world economic system and his dire predictions for a sustained crash of the dollar. Despite his pessimism, he held out hope that, one day, we could “stop stupid material growth” that destroys communities and the planet, and adopt smart growth, like “an infinity of growth in learning. An infinity of growth in beauty. Large amounts of growth in care, help and restoration.” While good doesn’t always win out in the narratives Rideout examines here, these stories do provide the space to, as he says, “imagine alternatives,” where those who are marginalized in our monstrous, greed-based economy reclaim their power and, in some cases, even beat back the forces of darkness to restore communities of care and mutual support. Perhaps, as we read gothic texts along with Rideout, we can find the inspiration to move forward in a way that does the same in the real world.