The narrow vote in favour of the UK leaving the European Union in June 2016 marked a seismic shift in British political life. The challenge is to understand the vote as part of a wider cultural ecology, and this is a chapter about how gothic texts helped form and reflect on that cultural shift. Jackson Batchelor's film Monstrous Disunion (2021) makes Brexit and horror converge explicitly. In this low-budget shocker, a family reunion fractures around arguments over whether Britain should leave or remain in the European Union. This devolves into animalistic violence and then into an outbreak of something much worse. The film is a blunt-force satire, though, and this chapter is focused on less explicit conjunctures. Instead I want to explore how we might read the insistent coupling together of the political, economic and cultural rupture in the years running up to the 2016 Brexit vote with the gothic mode in British (or rather primarily English) culture.

Scholars of the gothic often appeal to the ‘anxiety model’ to legitimate the social relevance of the genre, although there has been some interrogation of this default (Baldick and Mighall 2012). My aim is not to read gothic narratives or tropes as neat allegories of a riven social context. Instead, somewhat after Fredric Jameson's historicism, it is to observe certain homologies within a ‘common objective situation’ that will produce ‘many varied responses’ rather than a singular line (Jameson 1984, 178). The gothic, brooding on historical legacies and ambivalent inheritances, and always with a heightened emotional tenor, is a cultural form that articulates well a ‘structure of feeling’, that experiential and affective conjuncture that Raymond Williams suggested might carry all ‘the known complexities, the experienced tensions, shifts and uncertainties’ of a particular moment (Williams 1977, 129). Meanwhile, Kristian Shaw (2018) and Dulcie Everitt (2021) have argued for a literature of Brexit, a ‘BrexLit’, to be a useful seismograph for Britain's reimagined community after 2016. Brexit Gothic, if such a thing exists, would never be reducible to a single stance (reactionary or subversive), but is likely to be encountered as a diffuse and conflicted mode, perhaps most articulate about the conditions that produced Brexit when it seems least likely to be addressing it.