The pandemic has haunted gothic since its inception. The same medieval culture that produced the architecture out of which gothic emerged also engendered texts and artwork that depict the plagues that decimated human populations during this period. The European gothic cathedral was often decorated with skeletons performing the Dance Macabre, foreshadowing the corpses that rise in early gothic texts such as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), and prefiguring the mass death that occurs in Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826). Similarly, plague narratives such as Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1387–1400), William Langland's Piers Plowman (1370–86) and Daniel Defoe's widely read A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) all influenced the first gothic texts not simply by providing their authors with themes, characters and imagery, but also by furnishing a paradigm of terror and pending doom. Like the pandemic, early gothic summons a destroying darkness that rises apparently from within, that slowly reveals itself through signs upon the body, and that travels secretly along familial ties so that a parent can be seen to breathe ‘death upon … his own children’ (Defoe 1722, 233). Gothic, just like the pandemic narrative that pre-dates it, struggles to explain such abject darkness, but it still theorises it as a deserved punishment from God or the bitter harvest of a long secular history of structural violence.

Out of these beginnings, the pandemic has become a dominant theme in globalgothic, and as such it has informed different types of gothic narrative, from the xenophobic and heteropatriarchal tales of apocalypse that circulated in Britain during the twilight of the British Empire, where contagion originates in the sexually or racially foreign ‘other’, to radical twenty-first-century narratives where pandemics are described as collapsing the Cartesian binary that sets humanity apart from extrahuman ecology, and where white heteropatriarchy appears as a pathogen, rather than as an antidote. This spreading of pandemic gothic has not occurred simply within the mode itself; gothic figures of contagion have entered a global social and political vocabulary, from Karl Marx's 1867 description of capitalism as vampiric, to the characterisation of African immigrant workers as zombies in the twenty-first century (Comaroff and Comaroff 2002). Thus, (pandemic) gothic can be said to constitute a global ideational and cultural pandemic in itself.