Postscripts to Darkness

Editor, educator, researcher and writer, most often of essays, but occasionally also of fiction and poetry.

Their essays primarily focus on Gothic, horror and weird fiction in its literary, cinematic, and sequential art guises, and have appeared in numerous collections and journals, many of them pictured here. They can be reached by email at moreland.sean@gmail.com.

They co-edited the essay collections Fear and Learning: Essays on the Pedagogy of Horror (with Aalya Ahmad, McFarland, 2013) and Monstrous Children and Childish Monsters: Essays on Cinema’s Holy Terrors (with Markus Bohlmann, McFarland, 2015), and edited  The Lovecraftian Poe: Essays on Influence, Reception, Interpretation and Transformation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), and New Directions in Supernatural Horror Literature: The Critical Influence of H. P. Lovecraft (Palgrave, 2018).

Most of their recent scholarly research and writing (including articles on Mary Shelley,  Poe,  Lovecraft, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Junji Ito and Thomas Ligotti) is folding itself uneasily into a book-length study tentatively called “Repulsive Influences: 350 Years of Cosmic Horror.” It explores how the philosophical poetics of atomism, linked to the reception and English translations of Lucretius in different historical periods, shaped popular concepts of materialism, mortality, madness, and fate, and thereby the course of Gothic, horror and weird fiction from the early modern period through to the early twenty-first century. Each chapter pairs a particular translation of Lucretius with work by two or more contemporaneous writers and/or artists.

They’ve lectured, presented papers, participated in panels and interviewed authors/creators at a wide variety of both academic and popular conferences and conventions internationally over the years. Here is part of a 2009 interview about Dracula and vampire films with Dacre Stoker at Ottawa’s Writer’s Festival. Here is an audio recording of a talk on American Gothic novelist Charles Brockden Brown given at the 2011 Daimonic Imagination conference in Canterbury, UK. Here is a pre-recorded lecture titled “To Form the Possessive: Visual and Narrative Infestation in Possession Horror Films,” presented as part of Montreal Monstrum Society’s 2021 course. Here is a recording of a panel at NecronomiConProvidence 2022, in which they discuss Junji Ito’s work alongside horror and weird fiction writers Kassandra Khaw, Nadia Bulkin and K. H. Vaughan.

Their short fiction and award-winning poetry has appeared  in places including  Over the Rainbow: Folk and Fairytales from the Margins, Lackington’s, Black Treacle, Acidic Fiction, Despumation, Pavor Nocturnus, and Dissections. Here is a video recording of a 2009 poetry reading as part of Ottawa’s Tree Reading Series. Here is a recording of a collaborative poetry performance as part of Ottawa’s A/B Series in 2011. Here is a 2019 audio recording of their story “As Never Bird Sang Before.”

They teach a wide variety of undergraduate courses (on subjects including Gothic and horror fiction, transatlantic literary influence, American literature, comics and sequential art, literary theory and philosophy, literature and sexuality/gender identities, and intersections between literary, film and digital cultural studies) for the English Department at the University of Ottawa.