Examining fictional purgatorial worlds in contemporary literature, film and video games, this book examines the way in which the female characters trapped within them construct identity positions of resistance and change. With the rise of populism, the Alt. Right, and isolationism in world politics in the second decade of the 21st Century, parallel, purgatorial worlds seem to currently proliferate within popular culture across all media, including television shows and films such as The Handmaids Tale, Us, Watchmen, and Margaret Atwood's The Testaments among many others. These texts depict alternate worlds that express the darkness and violence of our own, arguably none more so than for women.
Featuring essays from a broad range of international contributors on topics as wide-ranging as mental health in the Silent Hill franchise and liminal spaces in the work of David Mitchell, this book is an original, timely and hope-filled analysis about overcoming the confines of a patriarchal, fundamentalist world where the female imaginative might just be the last, best hope.

Simon Bacon is an independent scholar working in Poland. He has previously edited works such as Gothic: A Reader, Horror: A Companion and Monsters: A Companion. Previous monographs include Becoming Vampire, Dracula as Absolute Other, Eco-Vampires, Vampires From Another World, and Unhallowed Ground.

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Prologue, Simon Bacon
Introduction, Simon Bacon
Part One: Purgatorial Space
1. Miasma Theory, Particular Matter and Modern Horror, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
2. Between Hell and Hel: Gender, History and Nature in Subterranean Spaces, Elana Gomel
3. La Llorona Hauntings: Storytelling Feminicide at the Purgatorial Mexico/US Border, Cristina Santos and Sarah Revilla-Sanchez

Part Two: Daughters, Mothers, Trauma
4. "I Lost All Hope of Going Up the Hill": Silent Hill as a Female Specific Inferno, Dawn Stobbart
5. "Mother Is God in the Eyes of a Child": Doppelgängers, Punishment, and Maternal Otherworlds in Silent Hill and Triangle, Catherine Pugh
6. Pray and Obey: The Horror (and Purgatory) of Religious Fundamentalism, Nicola Young

Part Three: Female Development in Purgatorial Spaces
7. The New Eden? The Female-Centered Purgatorial Space of Dollhouse, Erin Giannini
8. The Vampire in the Attic: Constructing Monstrous Female Identities in Liminal, Purgatorial Spaces, Taryn Tavener-Smith
9. "Into the Further We Go": Exploring Gender, World-Building, and the Return of the Fantastic in the Insidious Franchise, Mark Richard Adams
10. Coded Outcry: Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985 and 2017-Present) and The Testaments (2019), Gina Wisker
Part Four: Spaces of Female Resistance
11. Of Monstrous Spaces: Female Identity in American Horror Story: Murder House and American Horror Story: Hotel, Pembe Gözde Erdogan
12. "This Time I'll Get It Right": Female Coming-of-Age Within Purgatorial Time Loops, Shawn Edrei
13. The Trauma We Inherit: Sister Night, Black Female Identity, and the Parallel Rachel Purgatory of Watchmen, Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
14. "We're Human Too, You Know": Tethered Journeys and Shadowed Struggles in Jordan Peele's Us (2019), Nancy Johnson-Hunt
Index