Plagues and Pandemics in Horror

The spread of COVID-19 is taking over our lives right now. And while I know for some of you, death and disease are the last things you want to read about right now, for many others literature is a place where we can process and confront our anxieties. This has been true throughout history. The Gothic, in particular, has always had a fascination with contagious illness. You can’t build an entire genre around nostalgia for the Middle Ages without grappling with the Black Death—a devastating plague that swept through Europe in the 1300s, killing millions. As Gothic literature developed, many authors—particularly in the Victorian era—had their own lives touched by such infectious diseases as tuberculosis, cholera, scarlet fever, and typhoid. The pandemics of the past and the present force us to confront our mortality and fears around infection and contagion. Some authors explore this through the invention of fictional plagues, while others use myth and monsters as metaphor for transmitting disease. Below are a few major works from Gothic and horror literature’s rich tradition of plagues and pandemics:

The Last Man by Mary Shelley (1826)

Mary Shelley contributed more to the burgeoning sci-fi/horror genre than just her debut novel, Frankenstein. One of her other novels, The Last Man, is the very first post-apocalyptic pandemic thriller. Set during the last decades of the twenty-first century (which was the far-distant future for Shelley, but seems much closer now), The Last Man features a world ravaged by plague, accompanied by storm surges and widespread panic. As the world’s population dwindles, survivors fight over resources and land not yet hit by the disease. Warring factions arise, including a religious cult led by a corrupt “messiah.” By the end of the novel, the protagonist Lionel is the only human left alive.

“The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe (1842)

This is one of my favorites of Poe’s short stories, and now it is particularly timely. The story features a fictional disease called the “Red Death,” which is clearly modeled on the medieval Black Death, or Bubonic Plague. The disease gets its name from its most horrific symptom: bleeding at the pores, which stains the skin of its victims scarlet. While the peasants are all dying of this disease, the selfish nobleman Prince Prospero decides to lock the gates of his castle and throw an extravagant party for all of his courtiers. They drink and dance at a masked ball, thinking that their wealth and power will keep them safe, but a mysterious guest arrives dressed as the personification of the Red Death. Prince Prospero and his revelers soon learn that castle walls cannot keep out disease.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson (1954)

I Am Legend is  the best-known novel by the American horror author Richard Matheson. It picks up with the idea that Mary Shelley’s novel ends with—what if you were the last man left alive? Though the disease that has left Robert Neville alone and isolated in I Am Legend is quite different from Shelley’s plague. Neville seems to be the only one immune to a pandemic that has killed off most of the human population and brought them back as revenants that blur the line between vampires and zombies. As he holes up inside his barricaded house, Neville tries to research the disease while also defending against his nocturnal, blood-sucking neighbors. By the end of the novel, Neville discovers that the disease is evolving and a select group of the vampires are beginning to build their own society. In this new world, the vampires are the normal ones and the last uninfected human is the stuff of legends…

How are you all holding up? Are you social distancing? What are you reading while stuck inside? Let me know in the comments, and feel free to peruse through The Gothic Library for plenty of book recommendations!