That Line of Darkness VOL II: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden

In That Line of Darkness Vol. II: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden, Robert A. Douglas continues his exploration of the history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as seen through a Gothic lens. As he did in the first volume, Douglas deploys Gothic conventions - the uncanny, psychic vampirism, the demonization of the other, the double, the compulsion for racial purity and the power of the primitive past to threaten the modernist present - to illuminate the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, Nazi Germany during the 1930s and modern America from the early Cold War to the war on terrorism.

The first volume - The Shadow of Dracula and the Great War - was grounded in literature. This second volume is grounded in historical fact, though Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness is a seminal text for Douglas' examination of America.

In The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden, the tropes are no longer those of vampires or the atavistic primitive embedded in the spirit of a respectable Victorian gentleman, but are drawn from the world of police states and even from open societies engaged in propaganda that has been frequently vampiric in substance, constructed to dehumanize the "other". The Gothic survives here, as Douglas shows, in the horror of interrogation chambers, mass executions and the "undead" of the camps - and the more recent and inhumane treatment of civilians.