Spectral West

Keith McDonald holds a PhD from Birkbeck College, the University of London, and is an Associate Professor in Film Studies and Media at York St John University. He is the co-author of Guillermo del Toro: Film as Alchemic Art (2014) and Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film: Transnational Perspectives (2021).Wayne Johnson is Senior Lecturer in Media and Film Studies at York St. John University. He received his PhD from Keele University. He is the co-author of Contemporary Gothic and Horror Film: Transnational Perspectives (2021) and co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Folk Horror (2024).

"Through detailed, skillful readings and encyclopedic knowledge, the book The Spectral West probes a grim relationship between the Western and the Gothic, unearthing refracted links and resonances to expose spectral inheritances that are always fascinating, engaging and deeply troubling.” —Neil Campbell, Emeritus Professor of American Studies, University of Derby, UK.“Both the scholar and the enthusiast will find themselves watching Westerns from a new vantage point after reading this book, as if seeing the plains, towns and graveyards in a new, shadowy light for the first time.” —Jenny Barrett, Edge Hill University, UK.

• Acknowledgements  ; Introduction: The Western as Eco-Gothic  ; Part 1: The Savage West  ; 1  The Revenant West: Gothic and Spectral Landscapes; 2  Ghost Riders in the Lonesome West: The Homely and the Un-Homely; Part 2: To the Boneyard  ; 3  Dead Men Walking; 4  Desolation Road; Part 3: The New Viscera in the Twenty-First Century Western  ; 5  Tooth and Claw; 6  ‘I Like the Way You Die, Boy’; Coda  ; Bibliography  ; Index