California has long been associated with sunshine and healthy outdoor living. Yet there is an alternative, a dark side, in the realm of California Gothic: California as the site of disease: diseases like tuberculosis (TB) and the secret, shameful syphilis, or AIDs, or imagined diseases that might destroy civilization, perhaps by turning humanity into zombies or vampires. Illness, as Susan Sontag has schooled us, can be a metaphor and can reveal our anxieties about ourselves, our society, and our belief in progress. Here, as in other ways, California has been the bleeding edge of American culture at large. This chapter is a quick trip through a statue gallery, or pest house, of more than a century of California Disease Gothic.

Not long after the Gold Rush had nearly wrecked California’s foothills and waterways through hydraulic mining and miners and settlers had massacred most of the state’s interior native population, visitors and residents began to promote its wholesome climate. John Muir wrote of hiking and mountaineering in the Sierra as physically and spiritually healing—a faith still celebrated by the Sierra Club. The dry Mediterranean climate of Southern California might heal lung disease. Charles Fletcher Loomis, for example, walked from Ohio to Los Angeles in 1884 seeking to cure his TB and stayed to edit the magazine Land of Sunshine (later Out West) and promote California as a destination of health and prosperity.

People came. Probably Health should be inserted into the title of Claire Faye Watkins’s novel, Gold Fame Citrus, as a reason for the state’s boom.

And there was good reason to flee the cities of the East and Europe, which were, in fact, cesspools of disease. According to Lyra Kilston,

California, the land of perpetual sunshine, might seem the least Gothic of American regions. Where are the “deep and gloomy wrongs” (in Hawthorne’s phrase) that are obviously part of New England’s heritage or that of the South? New England’s witchcraft trials, its isolated villages, and its brutal winters are obviously the stuff of the Gothic. The South has the legacy of slavery and its aftermath, its tangled racial bloodlines, swamps, crumbling mansions, and the legend of the Lost Cause, all of which have nourished some of the most profound and disturbing American literature, much of it Gothic.

Instead, the Golden State has the California Dream. This complex of ideas and aspirations needs to be unpacked and has historical roots that anticipate the European discovery of North America. For Americans from the nineteenth century to the present, the dream has evolved continuously, as documented by Kevin Starr’s magisterial eight-volume history. The California Dream has meant a variation on the American Dream, restated with urgency, since, as Joan Didion observed, “things had better work here, because here … is where we run out of continent” (p. 172). At a minimum, it evokes an aspiration to begin again and live a fulfilling life in a welcoming climate and landscape. Obviously, the California Dream is now threatened by ecological disaster and global pandemics, both of which were long anticipated by California authors, as well as the failure of its inhabitants to become worthy of its landscape.

The contention of this book is that the California Dream is also a source of the Gothic, like the myth of the Old South, and that the California Gothic has much to say about the situation of America and the world. We need to explore this complex idea and see what was left out as it was constructed. The California dream has required the suppression of other narratives, and these alternate realities and lost stories, in the nature of the suppressed, return as the uncanny nightmares of the California Gothic.

Californians built their civilization in the space of a few decades in places where “they shouldn’t have” (p. 3), as Marc Reisner reminds us: in earthquake zones, on the interface with wild lands subject to fire, and far from fresh water. The landscape has been both inspiring and threatening.

In 1845, the village of Yerba Buena had a population of about 300 souls. By 1850, the rechristened San Francisco was the biggest city on the west coast of the United States. San Francisco became rich first from the Gold Rush and then from the Comstock Lode of silver in Nevada. By the 1860s, its wealth as a banking and shipping center brought sophistication in the form of grand buildings, opera, and theater. The city had passed from Cole’s “The Savage State” to “The Consummation of Empire” in a single generation.

This growth had come at a cost. The Sierra foothills had been stripped of soil by hydraulic mining, which had flooded the Sacramento Delta and the Bay with silt. The native population of the Central Valley and the Sierra had been largely destroyed. Racial tensions were growing between white settlers and Chinese immigrants. In 1868, a major earthquake destroyed much of the city, underscoring the fragility of the City by the Bay. Such racial and environmental dissonance, suppressed in the narrative of progress, would return in California Gothic.

By the 1860s, San Francisco’s young “Bohemians,” a group of writers including Bret Harte, Ina Coolbrith, Warren Stoddard, and for a time Mark Twain, had begun what Franklin Walker dubbed (in a 1939 book by that title) “San Francisco’s Literary Frontier.” The Bohemians, writes Ben Tarnoff, “would bring a fresh spirit to American writing, drawn from the new world being formed in the Far West” (p. 5). Chief among the Bohemians was Bret Harte, who edited The Golden Era and then The Overland Monthly, a serious publication intended to rival The Atlantic, as for a time it did. Yet Harte was not a simple booster of California and the West. He knew its dark side. As a young journalist, he had been driven out of the town of Eureka when he reported honestly on the massacre of a nearby California Indian encampment. His tales of the gold fields were not just humorous or picturesque. Some of them, if not Gothic, could be considered at least “Gothic adjacent.”

Ecogothic is based on the knowledge that human activity has changed the planet’s climate and biosphere and that the extinction of human and much animal life is likely, if not inevitable. Ecogothic thus looks backward and forward: forward to an apocalypse, backward to what we have done—and the knowledge that we have repressed or ignored.

The ecological disaster, the accelerating Sixth Extinction, is a global concern and not particular to California’s magic island. But novels and films about global collapse slot easily into the rich tradition of the California apocalypse, and especially the destruction of Los Angeles, or what Mike Davis has called (in the title of his 1998 book) the “ecology of fear.” Los Angeles has been destroyed more than any other city, even more than Tokyo, by earthquake, alien invasion, zombies, plague, and every other imaginable means. But increasingly, the agency of destruction does not have to be imagined but merely observed. As we contemplate the end of our familiar world, we also re-evaluate our received notions of natural history, as embodied in institutions like museums and zoos, and we reconsider California’s long tradition of nature writing and celebration of its unique landscape.

This chapter will examine two novels of the near future that imagine the disaster that awaits: Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Claire Vaye Watkins’ Gold Fame Citrus (2015). In contrast, Lydia Millet’s Ecogothic trilogy, How the Dead Dream (2008), Ghost Lights (2011), and Magnificence (2012), is set in the present and is a meditation on how humanity’s destructive relationship with the animal world has brought us to this point.

The prescient Octavia Butler (1947–2006) understood before most novelists that climate change would crash infrastructure and civil order and send populations fleeing as refugees. Los Angeles, always fragile, perched on an edge between a desert interior and undrinkable salt water, dependent on stretched arteries bringing water from distant sources, would be an early victim of a hotter and dryer world. The teen-age protagonist of Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina, remembers a rain shower in which the delighted child played—a wonder seldom repeated. Now, in a time of endless drought and social collapse, ordinary people live in barricaded communities and venture out into the chaos in armed groups.

To fully understand the innovative potential of intersectional advocacy, one needs to understand the traditional policymaking process that it confronts. In Chapter 2 illustrates how policy boundaries contribute to inequality in the United States. Drawing from a textual analysis of the Congressional hearings on the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and newspaper articles covering VAWA, the chapter presents evidence that the policy boundaries in the VAWA harmed intersectionally marginalized groups. Moreover, it shows advocacy groups that did not represent intersectionally-marginalized groups contributed to the setting of these policy boundaries by participating in the policymaking process. Underscoring how advocacy groups that do not represent multiply-marginalized intervene in the policymaking process, this chapter illustrates what is at stake with the traditional policymaking process and the ways that mainstream advocacy groups have participated in it.