It is becoming increasingly commonplace to assert that the gothic provides a vocabulary uniquely suited to our present geohistorical moment, in which unfolding transformations to the Earth System are placing the biosphere in the shadow of existential threat. ‘If there is a new direction in Gothic Studies,’ writes Holly-Gale Millette, ‘it is one centred by the critical acceptance of the degeneration and ruin that the human has wrought in its epoch’ (2020b, 91). ‘The Gothic seems … well placed to capture these anxieties’ about ‘climate change and environmental damage’, Andrew Smith and William Hughes concur (2013, 5), in one sense because gothic has always understood – in the words of Justin Edwards, Rune Graulund and Johan Höglund – that ‘[d]igging in the dirt is a hazardous pursuit’. Contemporary global heating – overwhelmingly the product of two centuries of fossil extraction – would seem to confirm the point. However, as Edwards, Graulund and Höglund note, getting to the bottom of current biospheric shifts – determining what has caused these – demands further excavation, thus requiring ‘the introspective, abject historical work in which gothic always engaged its audience’ (2022, xi).

What is emerging from this gothic mining of the depths is by no means beyond debate. Millette and Edwards, Graulund and Höglund choose to locate their accounts of gothic in the Anthropocene – the age in which ‘man’ is culpable – but all these critics rightly acknowledge other ways of naming our present planetary situation. Though it is subtitled ‘The Gothic Anthropocene’, Edwards, Graulund and Höglund's Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth is structured into sections that attend also to ‘Plantationocene’, ‘Chthulucene’ and ‘Capitalocene’ – concepts that can each be understood as providing a certain perspective on the relationship between human societies and the rest of nature. Importantly, however, the terms also designate distinct political projects, which differently identify the drivers and effects of the biospheric transformations that are currently under way. Grasping this point is crucial, because it shows that the struggle over how we name the present is not a matter of semantic finickiness: to name, in other words, is to locate accountability, and so to make possible certain kinds of action and demand such action from certain groups. This applies also to the Anthropocene, though the concept is sometimes reverted to as a kind of neutral catch-all theory, and, as we shall see, this manoeuvre is not always helpful.