9/11 as American Gothic: Terror and Historical Darkness in Patrick McGrath's Ghost Town

McGrath's Ghost Town, published after 9/11, is an extraordinary fictional response to the tragic historical event. The book consists of three stories, each presenting elements of terror and violence central to the quotidian realities of Manhattan from 1776 to 2001. Through the Gothic mood and devices, these stories unveil dimensions of the culture of 9/11 that have been precluded from the American rhetoric on the disaster and thus provided a new historical conceptualization of 9/11. American Gothic is not merely a literary genre, as McGrath suggests; it is also a discourse on the nation's past that is characterized by contradictions of progress and decay, brightness and darkness. This paper attempts to elucidate McGrath's critical perspective on American political, cultural, and moral life under the impact of 9/11, his Gothic sense of American history, and his notion of the haunting of historical darkness which pre-existed as well as pervaded the 9/11 experience.