Novelists Bradford Morrow and Patrick McGrath bring together a provocatively eclectic group of writers who show us that gothic literature is very much alive and well, although much changed from the days of Matthew Gregory Lewis, Mary Shelley, and Edgar Allen Poe.  
 
Gone are the traditional dripping grottoes, gone are the wind-blasted, foggy heaths of yore. Gothic terror now has become interiorized and contemporized, finding its expression through the daily perversities and madness of our modern lives.
 
"The prospect of apocalypse," write the editors in their introduction, "through human science rather than divine intervention, has redefined the contemporary psyche.  Now hell is decidedly on earth, located within the vaults and chambers of our own minds."
 
Contributors include Angela Carter, Bradford Morrow, Emma Tennant, Patrick McGrath, Peter Straub, Ruth Rendell, John Edgar Wideman, Kathy Acker, William T. Vollmann, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Coover, Lynne Tillman, Jamaica Kincaid, Martin Amis, Jeanette Winterson, Paul West, Anne Rice, Janice Galloway, Scott Bradfield, John Hawkes, Yannick Murphy.