Scholars often frame Republican supporters in 1860 as the moral center of American politics. The Republicans, after all, were antislavery proponents, at least in a moderate sense. But it is important not to infuse Republican Party morality with a more modern ethic, such as an antiracist or antiviolence stance. Most Republicans focused on White enslavers and the institution of slavery without developing much policy on freed slaves beyond colonization - the removal of African Americans from the United States. Despite the Republican Party’s self-promotion as a coalition committed to peaceful law and order (in contrast to the bullying leadership of slaveholders and Democrats), it was an organization built to resist and fight. In the 1860 election cycle, the Wide Awakes, Abraham Lincoln’s Republican backers, engaged their Democratic counterparts in physical battle across the northern, urban landscape. Shootings, stabbings, chasings, and beatings marked these clashes. Chapter 6 explores how partisan physical and electoral fights would shape questions of violence and the national state in the challenging period between Lincoln’s election and his assumption of office.

Beginning in the immediate postwar and coincident with the Paramount antitrust decree, writers of both fiction and screenplays began to insist on the ownership of the works they produced. While flesh-and-blood authors conceived of themselves as corporate bundles of properties, the studios began to behave more like artists, investigating the possibilities of movies geared to specialized audiences. The literariness of these new pictures should be understood as the expression of a new conception of authorship pervading the industry. Many movies now considered noir, including In a Lonely Place (1950) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), manifest the industry’s shifting attitudes toward source material, original screenplays, and, ultimately, the idea of the Hollywood movie as a kind of literary expression. This chapter concludes with an analysis of All About Eve (1950). In its narrative of accommodation and uneasy coherence in the face of a common threat, Eve, unlike In a Lonely Place and Sunset Boulevard, strikes a balance between the conflicting intentions of its director (the self-consciously literary Joseph Mankiewicz) and its studio (Twentieth Century-Fox), giving legible shape to both.

Film noir, like the beautiful but deadly oleander bush, was a European import that took root in California and flourished.

Noir, which was named retroactively by French film critics Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton (Fine in Crow, Companion to American Gothic p. 476), was a style that developed early in the silent era in Germany and Austria. Noir combined an expressionistic aesthetic involving deep shadows and odd-angle shots with a largely Gothic subject matter. Early noir films included such obviously Gothic titles as The Golem, Nosferatu, and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. When noir directors, including Paul Wegener, Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene, and F. W. Murnau, fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, they joined other creative émigrés from Germany and Austria in Southern California. In Hollywood, the expat directors blended their noir aesthetic with plots drawn from hard-boiled crime fiction to create California film noir, which, as David Fine indicates, is “a twentieth-century manifestation of American Gothic, contemporaneous with Southern Gothic fiction” (p. 475).

The scripts for Hollywood film noir were often adaptations of hardboiled crime stories by such alumni of The Black Mask as Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and Raymond Chandler. Studios, in fact, often employed the authors to adapt their fiction into screenplays. The resulting noir crime films are filled with Gothic tropes: masks and doubles, buried secrets, and the incursion of the past into the present. The ambiance of dread in these screenplays draws in part on the shared traumas of the twentieth century, the Great Depression, and the thirty-year war soon to enter its terrible second act (Scruggs pp. 123–37). But there were also local concerns coloring California noir, including the morbidity of a land of sunshine filled with the sick and the dying, as discussed in Chapter 6, the corruption of local politics and law enforcement that continued despite the reforms of the Progressive Era, and the sex scandals plaguing the film industry. These scandals, as catalogued by Kenneth Anger in his salacious history of Hollywood Babylon, were reflected in the erotic charge of many Hollywood movies, even during the era of the Hayes Act.

This chapter will use the term “noir” to describe both noir film and the fiction that exists symbiotically with it.

Facing west from California’s shores, Walt Whitman asked, “But where is what I started for so long ago, and why is it yet unfound? (p. 267). Unable to answer these questions, Californians have remade their state again and again. At times it has seemed complete, as, for example, in 1940, when according to Kevin Starr (1940–2017), its network of new roads and bridges and a water supply adequate for a maturing California made it “a unity achieved by public works.” (Endangered, p. 339).

Then again, the world rushed in during WWII, unmaking and remaking everything. More recently, the tech industry of Silicon Valley created tens of thousands of new jobs, changing not only the state’s but the nation’s economy, as completely as did the California gold rush.

And still, as scholars Katarzyna Nowak-McNeice and Agata Zarzyka recently observed, “California does not make sense” (p. 3). A flippant response would be that it must make pretty good sense for the forty million citizens who have chosen to live here and who have built an economy that is the fourth or fifth largest in the world.

Nowak-McNeice and Zarzycka have a point, however. The narrative that we Californians tell ourselves, as the above chapters have tried to show, has been constructed by suppressing much of the story. The California dream, in its various evolutions, is maintained by omission and forgetting. What is repressed or ignored returns in the California Gothic. Yet it would be a mistake to make California a scapegoat for all that is wrong in the United States or the world. Jeremiads about the failure of California, often with pictures of the homeless in San Francisco, Oakland, and Los Angeles, can be read in the media every day and are themselves willful suppressions of shared national shortcomings. Some sixty years ago, Wallace Stegner summed up the dynamic between California and the rest of the nation thus: “Like the rest of America, California is unformed, innovative, ahistorical, hedonistic, acquisitive, and energetic, only more so.” (p. 28). The quotation is often given in an abbreviated form, in a way that stresses the difference between California and the rest of the country: California exaggerates, is extreme. The full passage, with its catalog of shared qualities, indicates the common ground: not different, only intensified.

California’s bohemians, beats, or hippies—as the name has changed over the decades—have sought refuge, enlightenment, or community among the forests and surf of the central and north coasts since the early twentieth century. This chapter follows these dreamers from the Carmel colony and the rugged Big Sur to the remote area known as the Lost Coast. Their stories were shaped into Gothic narratives by writers as diverse as John Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon, Denis Johnson, and Kem Nunn.

Et in Arcadia Ego

The Carmel artist colony produced few works of Gothic literature, if we discount the weird longer poems of George Sterling, which I consider to be dreadful. But the history of this tribe is itself a Gothic story and is the prototype of many stories of wrecked illusions in the coastal California landscape.

The community began as an outpost of the vigorous bohemian culture of San Francisco. The ideas of John Muir were in the air, and the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was a further incentive to escape the metropolis. The first bohemian pioneers in Carmel built cabins in the idiom of the emerging Bay Area regional tradition, developed by architects like A. Page Brown and Bernard Maybeck, that stressed a connection with the landscape and use of local materials, as described by architectural historians Freudenheim and Sussman. The poet George Sterling’s cabin featured a 30 by 18-foot living room finished in oiled redwood and a massive fireplace and chimney built of chalk rock he hauled himself from the Carmel Valley. The photographer Arnold Genthe built a cabin with a huge combination studio and living room, with massive roof beams supported by redwood trunks with the bark left on. Never to be upstaged in the back-to-nature department, Mary Austin, already celebrated for The Land of Little Rain (1903), built a treehouse, which she called a wik-i-up, as a writer’s studio, and often could be glimpsed walking through the forest dressed in flowing Grecian robes, or the fringed and beaded dress of an Indian princess.

At the center of the Carmelites, master of their revels, was George Sterling (Fig. 3.1). Now nearly forgotten, Sterling once seemed the most promising poet of the Pacific Coast.

California existed in the minds of Europeans as a literary construct before the idea was attached to a physical space.

The New World of the Americas was, at first, for Europeans, a constellation of islands. The islands putatively “discovered” by Columbus were seen through the lens of European tales and theories, both ancient and modern: the Terrestrial Paradise, Atlantis, Utopia, and fantasies about Amazon warriors. As stories came back to Europe of new lands in the Atlantic and Caribbean, they evoked yet more island fantasies. Shakespeare’s The Tempest (ca. 1610) was inspired in part by reports of Bermuda. Island by island, Spanish and Portuguese explorers were hoping they had reached the fabled Spice Islands of Asia. When it was clear that South America was a continent, not an island, they rounded its southern tip and sailed on, still hoping for island riches.

When Hernán Cortéz reached the tip of Baja California in 1536, he thought he had discovered another island. Cortéz named this island California after a recent romance novel that was the latest version of European island fantasies. Las Sergas de Esplandían (1510), by Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo, imagined an island ruled by the Amazon queen Califia, and peopled by deeply tanned athletic women clad mainly in gold jewelry. Thus was this existing literary idea of California (and the California Girl) was grafted onto the physical space.

The long dispute over whether California was an island or not, as Dora Beale Polk documents, began immediately and lasted—strangely—for about 200 years. Even though explorers in the 1500s had reached the mouth of the Colorado River at the top of the Sea of Cortez (the Gulf of California), Spaniards reluctantly gave up the belief in Island California, and kept producing maps that showed a link from the northern gulf, or the Colorado River, to the Pacific (Fig. 1.1). Finally, in 1747, Spanish king Ferdinand VI ended the dispute by proclaiming that “California is not an island” (p. 326). This was long after Spaniards had reached the real spice islands of Asia and had established the first truly global trade networks, linking China through the Philippines to Mexico and Spain.

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.