Studies in American Fiction

In the twenty-first century, the ecogothic is unavoidable. Environmental hauntings abound. Our daily weather becomes less predictable, and species go extinct at terrifying and unprecedented rates. The unpredictable and unprecedented have quickly become the new normal, however, and we adjust to the regularity of these losses and the ongoing threat of wildfires, floods, snowstorms, droughts. These environmental issues are the result of our own past actions, accompanied by the desire to preserve the world as we know it and the more pressing need to learn how to live with environmental change. We are haunted by our past—by what has been lost, what remains, and our responsibility for all of the above; we are also haunted by futures that have not yet come to pass.

Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander (2021), an ecogothic eco-thriller set in the present and near future, grapples with these hauntings and their consequences. A story about Jane Smith (not her real name), a security analyst, who gets pulled into a tangled mystery about ecoterrorism, taxidermy, and animal smuggling, Hummingbird Salamander explores Jane’s—and our—willful ignorance about climate change and the sixth mass extinction. As Jane searches for Silvina, mysterious ecoterrorist and activist, she also learns more about the changes to the planet or, more accurately, begins to notice those changes that she has previously been comfortable enough to ignore. A familiar reality hovers in the background of the central conspiracy thriller plot—“Wildfires had consumed states in the heartland. Cyclones another. Earthquakes from fracking were omnipresent. Oil spills from pipelines that didn’t bear thinking about. Pandemic, a rumor gathering strength.”¹—reiterating the familiarity of the world, the severity of the environmental issues, and the way that such problems are easily ignored. Over the course [End Page 253] of the book (just as in the reader’s life), these changes become more commonplace until, Jane speculates, “Maybe we wouldn’t even notice it, after a while. Maybe we wouldn’t remember it had been different, until the next thing that happened to us. Until it killed us” (276). Like ghosts, these environmental hauntings are both existentially threatening and indeterminate, something you could look right through.

This sense of haunting marks Hummingbird Salamander as an ecogothic novel. Although often associated with Nature-strikes-back narratives, fears of the natural world,² and ecophobia (“an irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world”³), the ecogothic includes more than these negative attitudes toward the environment. As Dawn Keetley and Matthew Wynn Sivils write, “the ecogothic inevitably intersects with ecophobia,”⁴ but despite this recurring intersection and despite Simon Estok’s claim that “the ecoGothic is at core ecophobic,”⁵ not all ecogothic texts are fundamentally ecophobic. They share an emphasis on fear and dread, but the source of that fear and dread matters.

Therefore, although many ecogothic texts dramatize the harm the natural world might do to humans, the ecogothic does more than this. Stephen A. Rust and Carter Soles’s definition of ecohorror (which overlaps with but is not identical to the ecogothic) offers another way to conceptualize the ecogothic. They argue that ecohorror includes “texts in which humans do horrific things to the natural world, or in which horrific texts and tropes are used to promote ecological awareness, represent ecological crises, or blur human/non-human distinctions more broadly,”⁶ which allows for a much broader range of relationships between human and nonhuman. Similarly, Jennifer Schell writes that ecogothic literature tends “to regard environmental problems with a complicated mixture of anxiety, horror, terror, anger, sadness, nostalgia, and guilt.”⁷ Ecogothic literature, then, expresses more than just fear of nature; it “is often very critical of human beings and their destructive attitudes toward the natural world.”⁸ Ultimately, as Keetley and Sivils argue, the ecogothic reflects and responds to “a culture obsessed with and fearful of a natural world both monstrous and monstrously wronged.”⁹ This broader and more complex sense of the ecogothic highlights how “we fear the loss of nature at least as much as we fear nonhuman...