Chernobyl Trauma and Gothic

My novella Dicky Star and the Garden Rule (Forma Arts & Media, 2012) is among the literary works discussed in Stuart Lindsay’s new monograph Chernobyl Trauma and Gothic: Testimony, Cultural Memory and Global Literary Perspectives (Anthem Press, 2026).

Dicky Star and the Garden Rule was commissioned to mark the then twenty-fifth anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, and was published in the form of an A5 chapbook alongside a touring exhibition by the artists Jane and Louise Wilson.

The novella is out of print currently, but an ebook edition is available on request.

Tony White’s novella, Dicky Star and the Garden Rule, published to coincide with the photograph exhibition Atomgrad: Nature Abhors a Vacuum (2011) by Jane and Louise Wilson, is set in the UK city of Leeds in the days following the Chernobyl reactor explosion on 26 April 1986. In the story, Jeremy, a chronically depressed and unemployed artist, draws associations between a photograph of the destroyed reactor published in the Guardian newspaper and the narrative of a Fantasy novel by Michael Moorcock, The Warhound and the World’s Pain (1981) . . . Chernobyl proliferates and evades Jeremy’s representative memory, acting as indicator of the real object’s withdrawn properties and its sensual horror affect in the frantic, Gothic intertextuality woven by White’s novella…

I love that: ‘frantic, Gothic intertextuality’!

Here’s the blurb:

A textually rich, historically informed and theoretically sophisticated account of the Chernobyl crisis, its cultural
antecedents and its aftermath in global culture. This scholarly monograph explores the published eyewitness testimonies, poetry and literature surrounding the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. It argues for the contextualisation of the disaster’s collective traumatic wound and its Soviet political repression through public articulation of survivor experience and its interpretation by the trauma narratives of Science Fiction and the Gothic.

Find out more on the Anthem Press site…