Sick Waters, Hybrid Bodies, Ghosts of Pollution: The Ecogothic Blue Short Story

Thanks to the analysis of “Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan, Derelict” by Lucy Wood and “Smack” by Julia Armfield, this article defines the central characteristics of the ecogothic blue short story. It resorts to ecospectrality, as well as the tropes of hybridity, animalisation of water as sick, and the modes of the uncanny, the weird, and the eerie, in order to foreground the monstrosity of pollution on marine ecosystems. Concurrently, the brief temporality of the short story highlights the long-term slow violence of pollution. The ecogothic within blue stories is analysed as a cognitive and emotional framework used to represent the ecohorror engendered by consumerist polluting societies. It may encourage readers to reappraise their relationship to oceanic ecosystems, shifting from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric worldviews, while upsetting the dominant ideology as to the way humans may inhabit the world.