From Eco-Thriller to Eco-Horror: Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood as an Antipodean inversion of Bram Stoker’s Dracula

With its emphasis on the transgression of “natural” boundaries, the Gothic has always been a powerful medium for ecological themes. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) focuses on a clash between civilised Europe and the wilderness on its fringes. Published at the height of Victorian techno-optimism, it shifts genres from Gothic horror to thriller as its protagonists apply modern science to determine the limits of the titular Count’s supernatural powers. The novel ends with the victory of their scientific-rationalist mindset and the taming of the dangerous natural world represented through Dracula’s uncanny hybridity. Stoker’s Dracula has had an enormous impact on horror and thriller genres, but Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood (2023) presents a notable inversion of both its central conflict and its structure. In Birnam Wood, the wild fringes of rural New Zealand are threatened by the civilised centre, represented by American tech-mogul Robert Lemoine. The novel gradually shifts from thriller to the horror genre, as Lemoine’s rationalistic mindset leads him into atrocity. His predations are enabled by his technological hybridity, through which he excerpts an almost supernatural influence over his environment. Birnam Wood provides an intriguing model for contemporary EcoGothic narratives, using the subversion of thriller and horror structures to foreground contemporary ecological anxieties.