The inaugural SSAG Award for Best Monograph on the American Gothic goes to Bernice M. Murphy for The California Gothic in Fiction and Film. Our congratulations go to Bernice, who will receive a plaque and a check for $250 USD.
The awards committee consisted of Tom Hillard (presiding), Charles Crow, Monika Elbert, Jerrold Hogle, and Amala Poli. The committee would also like to acknowledge Kristopher Woofter and Kali Simmons for their initial help in brainstorming the SSAG Awards process and helping get it off the ground.
Of the nominated books and the winner, The California Gothic in Fiction and Film, the committee writes:
The awards jury was struck by the excellent quality of all nine of the monographs that were nominated, and among that very rich slate of nominees we’re excited to announce that the 2024 Best Monograph on the American Gothic goes to Bernice M. Murphy’s The California Gothic in Fiction and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).
Here are some accolades shared by the jury:
- “Murphy’s book is a beautifully written and pioneering introduction to a new field of gothic scholarship . . . California Gothic (2022) presents a nuanced, cutting-edge analysis of California’s contribution to the development of Gothic fiction and film. Capturing the recurrent unease of the California dream’s underside, Murphy identifies precisely what is at stake in anxieties about the California dream. Seamlessly moving between David Lynch’s use of horror tropes in subverting the starlet Hollywood fantasy in Mulholland Drive (2001) and cult fantasies in less-known films like The Invitation (2015) and 1BR (2019), Murphy demonstrates the long-standing influence of the Californian nightmare in horror film.”
- “Exhaustively researched, very well organized, and always precise in its consistently convincing arguments, Murphy’s California Gothic is, for now at least, the definitive go-to book on its subject. It strikes a fine balance between the vast and the specific: unfolding the historical sweep of California coming to see its many dark undersides in a wide range of Gothic forms, explaining the causes and different avenues of development within that anamorphic mirroring at every stage, and honing in, with brilliant analyses, on both landmark and lesser-known films to make them reveal the fundamental drives of Hollywood and California-Cult Gothic with a richness of insight available nowhere else.”
The SSAG Award for Best Publication on the American Gothic will alternate between best monograph and best article / book chapter. Next year’s award will be for best essay or book chapter on the American Gothic published in 2023 or 2024.