‘Whooah Bite! Whooah Bite!’ An impassioned howl fights its way through a rumbling screech of metal, skins and amplified wire. ‘Sex bat horror vampire sex …’ The singer writhes and flails, tall and skinny in a second-hand suit, head topped with a mess of back-combed black hair. ‘Sex bat horror vampire sex …’ The frame of reference is Gothic, heavily inflected with an early 1980s Goth chic suturing of punk and metal (but let’s not get too new romantic) in a dark swathe of leather, dye and make-up. Not that there are many Goths on stage: drummer and guitarist have...

A young woman’s passion beats in time with the steam engine that hurries her to the ancestral bed of her husband. She pauses to reflect on the mother and the girlhood that her marriage leaves behind. Her imagination flares: ahead is romance, magic and the fairy castle that will be her home. A poor, fatherless girl, she has become a Marquise, lavished with jewels and fine dresses. There are greater luxuries and riches to be enjoyed in the castle itself.

But this is only the beginning of a mock Gothic romance by Angela Carter, the short story entitled ‘The Bloody...

A hand appears, clutching an automatic pistol. Walls of grey reinforced concrete, dripping with dank slime, provide the gloomy surroundings. The flickering half-light of low ceilings, dark corridors and sliding steel doors offer little orientation as the handgun begins to negotiate the uninviting dungeon. Outside, a bleak, rocky lunar landscape is visible, as are the harsh outlines of the desolate bunker fortress that to the inmate is both labyrinth and prison. Suddenly, a shadowy movement is glimpsed through the pale glow of dials and lamps. A shot is fired. The assailant, a barely human figure in fatigues and body armour,...

She lies on the operating table, fully conscious. Artist, director, patient, performer, she is dressed in an Issey Miyake gown and continues talking as the first needle pushes beneath the skin, injecting local anaesthetic. Translators are ready, the signer too. Cameras are working, their operators dressed in dark gowns. Fruit bowls are arranged. Video screens flicker into life. The satellite uplink is operational. A surgeon marks the face for incision, dotting lines like a dress pattern. Longer needles slide behind the ear, under the forehead. An array of clocks on the wall tells the time in different zones. The first...

‘O-o-o-o!’ ‘A-a-a-a!’ ‘O-o-o-o!’ All of Gothic fiction turns upon a simple oscillation, on a singular differentiation, a child’s game: ‘fort!’ ‘Da!’ A game of loss and recovery, with the former rather than latter in the driving seat, its simplicity belies an extensive recalcitrance, its repetitions occluding some kind of excess to efforts of representation and theorisation. Away and back, disappearance and return, the exclamations and the projection and retrieval of a bobbin challenge, engender and thwart explanation: repetition defies neat models of life and self; it disrupts ordered and balanced circulations of pleasure, desire or identity; it introduces something alien...