Exploring the ecogothic in Marian Womack's "black isle"

We live in a frightening time. It is an age of anxiety, loneliness, and terror as the looming specters of climate collapse and innumerable environmental crises enter unbidden into our reality to an ever-greater extent, to the point that we often just need to look outside in order to observe the horrifying consequences that have finally caught up to our civilization. Into such calamity, the critical lens of the ecoGothic steps in to provide us with the necessary tools to confront the deep-seated myths of human control over and separation from the natural world that our society is built upon. In so doing, this lens reminds us of forgotten realities and points the way towards possible alternative futures in the Anthropocene as we seek to address the imaginative crisis lying at the rotten core of the compounding environmental problems we face today. Herein, I provide an overview of this nascent sub-discipline of ecocriticism and situate why the ecoGothic is well suited to speak to the ecological moment at the beginning of the 2020s. To provide a detailed e􀁛ample of a distinctl􀁜 􀂳Anthropocene ecoGothic􀂴 te􀁛t and to engage in the practice of close reading to tease out the elements of a text that make it so, I turn to author Marian Womack􀂶s 2016 short stor􀁜 􀂳Black Isle􀂴 with this theoretical lens in order to aid in the task of cataloging works that fall under the domain of this currently nebulous and expanding field of inquiry and to show why such works are of relevance as we slide into the Gothic future.