Cover image of Volume 37 Issue Number 1 of the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
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JFA 37.1 – Table of Contents
Across the Sally-verse: Reading William Wells Brown’s Clotel as Multiversal Speculative Fiction
Roshaunda Cade
“I Was Grendel”: Myth, Monstrosity, and the Fantasies of Belonging
John Irish
Mimesis and Epistemology of the Fantastic
Yandrey Lay
Walking Away from Omelas: How BTS Used Genre Fiction to Escape the Basement of the K-Pop Archetype
Jessica Kormos
“The wonder of the World, the admiration of all ages”: Merpeople and Wonder from the Early Modern
Wunderkammer to Post-Truth Media Culture
Alice Marinelli
To Be Fully Seen: Unmasking, Survival, and Authenticity in African and Diaspora Literature
Britney Rossman
Posthuman Gothic Networks and Psychic Connections in Sense8
Zita Husing
Narrativizing Memory in Prayaag Akbar’s Leila
Sreelakshmy Mohan
Uses of The Somatics of Media, Corporeal-Affective Nostalgia, and Experiencing Horror
John Glover
Creative Think Piece: Fragmonious: Freedom for a Genomically Created Human
James H. Ford, Jr.
REVIEWS
David Goudsward’sAdventurous Liberation: H.P. Lovecraft in Florida
Rev. by Katherine Kerestman
Stefan Ekman’s Urban Fantasy: Exploring Modernity Through Magic
Rev. by Timothy S. Miller
Abstracts
Roshaunda Cade
Across the Sally-verse: Reading William Wells Brown’s Clotel as Multiversal Speculative Fiction
William Wells Brown’s 1853 novel Clotel can be read as a multiverse investigating the possible life outcomes of Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman owned by Thomas Jefferson. Anachronisms and problematic linear progressions could suggest Clotel is an alternative history, but Brown’s novel is not one of a singular alternative history with a specific moment of departure, nor does the novel answer a singular meaningful What If question possible outside of a multiverse. By subverting the generic conventions of romance and sentimentalism, Brown creates space to propose alternative histories of Sally Hemings. Brown highlights canon events for the characters who serve as avatars of Sally Hemings’s experience. By demonstrating why Brown’s Clotel does not neatly fit the generic expectations of romance and sentimentalism, that it does not follow a linear chronology, and that it instead adheres to possibilities inherent in a multiverse, reading Clotel as a multiverse becomes a possibility. This essay demonstrates that it is possible to read Brown’s timeline slippages as indicative of Clotel as a work of speculative fiction highlighting a multiverse created to explore alternative histories and futures for Sally Hemings, the real-life enslaved concubine of Thomas Jefferson. However, it is the aspects Brown uses to build his multiverse that are seen as the flaws in his work. In this essay, Brown’s ostensible inconsistencies in genre and chronology coalesce to reveal the building blocks of a multiverse: something that is everywhere and in all times, all at the same time. This essay’s close reading of Brown’s text establishes that Brown’s novel should be considered a piece of speculative fiction beyond an alternative history; this essay demonstrates that Clotel constructs a multiverse. Brown uses slippery timelines to create a Sally Hemings-centric multiverse, the Sally-verse.
John Irish
“I Was Grendel”: Myth, Monstrosity, and the Fantasies of Belonging
This essay explores John Gardner’s Grendel as a philosophical meditation on identity, ideology, and exclusion, reframing the monster’s narrative as a failed search for community. Through Grendel’s encounters with Hrothgar’s nationalist order and the dragon’s anarchistic individualism, the novel stages a dialectic between two competing worldviews: each of which ultimately defines Grendel not as a subject, but as a symbolic necessity. This essay argues that Grendel’s identity is forged not through freedom, but through rejection and ontological Othering. Grendel’s longing to belong is mirrored by his realization that he is the thing against which belonging is defined. Not just excluded, Grendel becomes the symbolic boundary of the human. In this duality—drawn to meaning but cast out from it—Grendel discovers the root of his coming crisis. His final self-declaration, “I was Grendel,” is not a moment of self-actualization, but a bitter concession to the role assigned to him by myth and ideology. Grendel dramatizes the existential tension between myth and nihilism, belonging and solitude, order and chaos. Gardner constructs Grendel’s arc as a philosophical test case: a character caught between the seductions of communal myth and the isolating clarity of radical egoism, asking whether meaning is discovered or imposed, and whether any system—political, religious, or existential—can accommodate the outcast without first defining him as monstrous. Grendel’s journey is a philosophical tragedy in which both nationalism and anarchism prove inadequate for those outside their boundaries as the necessary Other; the dragon’s nihilism denies him value. His transformation is not the triumph of autonomy, but the resignation of a being with no place left to go. Grendel becomes a haunting realization that some identities are not chosen, but imposed—and that exile, once understood, may be final. By tracing Grendel’s emotional and philosophical arc from longing and disillusionment to reluctant resignation, this essay interprets Gardner’s novel as a critique of the structural limits of belonging and the existential isolation faced by those who haunt the edges of meaning.
Yandrey Lay
Mimesis and Epistemology of the Fantastic
Through the concept of phantasie, which phenomenology enunciates, and Tomás Albaladejo Mayordomo’s Typology of Worlds, this essay proves that any object, phenomenon, and process considered fantastic or belonging to fantasy should satisfy two conditions: its existence is thinkable or discursive, and its behavior should be incompatible with the laws of the real world. According to this theory, it is possible to affirm that, remembering Aristotle’s concept of mimesis, fantasy does not reproduce objective reality, but fantasy is its own reality. This essay argues that there are four types of relationships between real and fantastic worlds: separation, incursion, invasion, and standardization. These arguments explain theoretical problems enunciated by Tzvetan Todorov, Ana Maria Barrenechea, and Jaime Alazraki about the inclusion or exclusion of fairy tales from fantastic literature, the hypothetical exhaustion of the fantastic genre in the face of reality’s encroachments, and the notable discontinuity between the canonical fantastic texts of the nineteenth century and those written in the second half of the twentieth century. This essay affirms that the fantastic does not imitate what nature is not but rather that the fantastic is what nature is not. Fantasy creates new relationships between objects, processes, and phenomena that differ from those established by sensory perception and scientific discourse. Fantastic literature does not imitate reality but is its own reality.
Jessica Kormos
Walking Away from Omelas: How BTS Used Genre Fiction to Escape the Basement of the K-Pop Archetype
This article draws on Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” to examine how the K-pop group BTS leverages genre fiction to critique the idol industry and transcend traditional K-pop storytelling archetypes. Through analysis of their songs, music videos, and public personas, it explores how genre elements deepen global fan connection while challenging industry norms. The article positions the male K-pop idol as a genre fiction construct and examines how BTS deconstructs—and ultimately walks away from—that archetype. In doing so, the group reclaims narrative agency. Here, genre fiction becomes not just an artistic framework but a resistance strategy within contemporary K-pop. BTS does not merely walk away from Omelas—they build another world entirely, inviting ARMY and the global community to help shape it alongside them.
Alice Marinelli
This article traces the history of the grotesque and taxonomically ambiguous mermaid/merman figure first popularized in the early modern Wunderkammer, and examines its reemergence in twenty-first-century Euro-American media, particularly in formats such as tabloids and hoax documentaries that deliberately blur the boundaries between truth and fiction. While existing scholarship has often seen the legacy of the Wunderkammer in the development of the modern museum, less attention has been paid to how its aesthetics of hybridity, exoticism, and epistemic instability, which aimed at provoking the viewers’ suspension of disbelief and at constructing Eurocentric worldviews, persist in digital and post-truth culture. In the media discussed here, the Wunderkammer mermaid-type continues to function as a fantastical figure of wonder. However, as this article argues, both the notion of wonder and that of the fantastic that these creatures embody remain deeply entangled with their colonial histories of spectacle, appropriation, and epistemic control. Drawing on postcolonial theory, the article demonstrates how contemporary representations of merpeople reactivate visual and narrative strategies rooted in colonial systems of classification and othering, now repackaged as entertainment. Today’s representations of these creatures and the fascination they activate in their audiences reveal how the contemporary media discussed not only evoke, but also risk amplifying, colonial logics under the aesthetic of mystery, emotional appeal, and wonder, thus underscoring the pressing need for decolonial critique.
Britney Rossman
To Be Fully Seen: Unmasking, Survival, and Authenticity in African and Diaspora Literature
Analyzing African and Diaspora literature suggests that survival comes with fully unmasking and facing the difficulty behind self-acceptance. This concept has opened a perspective that challenges the misconception that power is a display of strength. The analyzed texts in this essay demonstrate that, throughout Africa and the African Diaspora, literary tradition offers a power, verging on a superpower, that can be accessed from within. By focusing on power, self-awareness, and self-confidence as core ideals, this essay explores ways in which authenticity may be demonstrated to be the key element of survival. The texts explored here include examples of how people facing adversity manage to find a sense of control; using Afropantheology and Reader Response, womanist, feminist, and de-colonialist analytical lenses to understand myth, literature, and documentary, these texts reflect the concept that the path to freedom frequently begins with the bravery to unmask. This essay argues that survival can feel impossible if one is not allowed the freedom to live in one’s truth; literature and theory from Africa and its Diaspora by writers such as Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Mame Bougouma Diene and Woppa Diallo, Shingai Njeri Kagunda, and Sofia Samatar provide an opportunity to understand this dynamic.
Zita Husing
Posthuman Gothic Networks and Psychic Connections in Sense8
This essay examines the Netflix series Sense8 through the intersecting lenses of posthuman theory and the Gothic mode to argue that the show envisions an empathic, networked form of subjectivity that challenges humanist notions of autonomy and embodiment of the human in one body. The Sensates—psychically connected individuals who transcend spatial, linguistic, and bodily boundaries—serve as posthuman figures who reframe monstrosity, otherness, and identity through affective interdependence. While Sense8 is grounded in science fiction tropes of genetic mutation and global technology, its emotional and aesthetic atmosphere is shaped by the Gothic. Gothic elements in Sense8 appear through affectively charged spaces and spectral figures that destabilize the boundaries between life and death, past and present, self and other. Drawing on science fiction traditions of collective consciousness and the Gothic’s history of boundary transgression, conjuring the Gothic sublime in its juxtaposition of dread and grandeur (Botting 4), Sense8 constructs a narrative of the fantastic in which affective labor, shared trauma, and erotic utopia generate a radical politics of empathy and care. In the end, the most Gothic element of Sense8 may not be its scenes of death, decay, or monstrosity, but its insistence that love, empathy, and shared suffering remain radical choices in a fractured world. This vision makes Sense8 a valuable text for examining the intersections of posthumanism, the Gothic, and networked digital life in contemporary science fiction. While existing scholarship has examined Sense8’s queer politics and posthuman imaginaries, this article argues that Sense8 allows examination of the networked intersections of the Posthuman Gothic to demonstrate redefinition of digital networks as embodied, affective, and erotic.
Sreelakshmy Mohan
Narrativizing Memory in Prayaag Akbar’s Leila
Set in a segregated dystopic world ruled by absolute order and the mythical element of purity, Prayaag Akbar’s Leila is a novel with an unreliable narrative because of the delusional episodes of the first-person narrator, Shalini. I study Leila as an attempt at narrativizing the protagonist Shalini’s seemingly unnarratable past. Shalini’s memory is culture-specific, recounting the truths and lies of a dystopia bent on the idea of corporeal purity. Much like the world-building of high fantasy, Leila’s world is governed by a definitive set of laws around purity and caste that are enforced with magical reverence. Memory, which usually serves as a tool to remember, assess, and reclaim one’s past, is cryptic and misleading in the novel, often acting as a deterrent, leading both the narrator and reader astray. The trauma that is brought upon Shalini aggravates the untrustworthiness of her story. Even though Shalini’s experiences revolve around Leila, they are shaped by the regressive community that structurally dictates the lives of its citizens. Akbar rewrites the idea of community as a place of refuge in Leila, instead locating it as a nexus of servitude and surveillance.
John Glover
Uses of The Somatics of Media, Corporeal-Affective Nostalgia, and Experiencing Horror
The presence of media in works of Horror may serve multiple purposes, sometimes heightening dread and sometimes creating unease. Films and novels created after the digital turn use analogue media and associated equipment differently than their predecessors, often to ends other than building the emotion most commonly identified as the core justification for Horror’s existence as a genre. The corporeal-affective nostalgia that media evoke in these works is absent from some works where media is used primarily as plot device, not aimed at evoking historicized sensations. The affective roles played by media in some horror films provide a useful counter to ubiquitous claims that works of Horror exist solely or primarily to evoke horror and related feelings.
James H. Ford, Jr.
Creative Think Piece: Fragmonious: Freedom for a Genomically Created Human
Fragmonious’s discovery of a hidden letter reveals a history of his ancestors, setting the stage for a dystopian beginning that ultimately unfolds into Fragmonious’s present life, controlled by artificial intelligence and the era of human chipping. The letter, written by a great ancestor and co-protagonist, reveals his life and the lives of his ancestors, forgotten and relegated to the trash files of history. Mosesemic could be offered answers to his questions concerning whether life has changed or if the people have overcome. Fragmonious and Vazenion’s journey deep into the future, as genomically created humans who are mentally chipped by the controlling power, follows a path similar to that of older cultures Mosesemic describes, which employed tattoos, branding, and physical whipping for control. The chips, of course, imply that the Government now enslaves Fragmonious and Vazenion, along with the other denizens of this new culture. For Fragmonious and Vazenion, genomic human-ware, removing the chips from their bodies means that the Governmental control established over them is gone. But now the bigger and more immediate question is where will Fragmonious and Vazenion go? After they remove the chips, they immediately set out to dominate their new world while subduing the old world of mental owners.