![]() Unless severely mentally impaired, humans are conscious of the inevitable end that awaits them, and, if pessimists, of the fact that any joy or pleasure derived from this world is ultimately transient and must succumb under the duress and strain of pain and fear as one comes closer to death. It has led us, most dramatically, to the knowledge of the certainty of our death. ![]() Instead, Ligotti’s Gothic horror is internal because consciousness is inescapable and, worst of all, the source of all our discontents. In the latter, psychosis or other illnesses may stand in for pervasive hauntings of the mind. Ligotti’s Gothic horror is one where the claustrophobia so often external in first wave Gothic fiction, with its emphasis on, for example, female captivity, is interiorised, but not necessarily in the psychological landscapes well-developed by Victorian and fin-de-siècle fictions. This essay is reproduced in a fuller version in William Hughes and Andrew Smith (eds), Suicide and the Gothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019). ![]()
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