Creating New Ghosts

Full disclosure. Not only am I not a scholar of the Gothic, but my understanding of the Gothic, until now, has been almost completely intuitive, born of an abiding taste for Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a youthful devotion to Stephen King and a curiosity about the Grant Wood painting American Gothic. I am not sure if this makes me the last person who should be reviewing Cynthia Sugars’s Canadian Gothic: Literature, History and the Spectre of Self-Invention or the absolutely right one.

Sugars’s book traces the appropriation of the Gothic tradition by Canadian (and pre-Canadian) writers in the service of creating a national literature and a national identity. It is important to note that she is using the term “Gothic” in the modern postcolonial sense: “concerned less with overt scenes of romance and horror” and more “with...