Austerity and the Aesthetics of the Undead in Niall Griffiths’s <i>Broken Ghost</i>

Between 2010–2024, successive Conservative-led governments in the United Kingdom implemented austerity measures and crafted powerful narratives to justify these policies. Right wing politicians, supported by the tabloid press, targeted the welfare state and the disabled individuals supposedly abusing the system, reviving centuries-old “undeserving poor” narratives to demonize benefits claimants as work-shy “scroungers” who have “broken” Britain. However, fictional counter-narratives (i.e., “austerity fictions”) have also started to emerge, such as Niall Griffiths’s 2019 novel Broken Ghost . Engaging directly with the political language of brokenness, the novel highlights the need to repair broken systems as opposed to broken individuals. Uncovering the aesthetics of the undead buried within the text, this article argues that the figure of the zombie depicts states of living death and the rotting corpse of the welfare state, while the spectral imagery brings to light the in/visibility of the debilitated protagonists, who are highly visible but socially and politically erased spectacles. Applying a crip lens, the suggestion is that the aesthetics of the undead also contain resistive potential, drawing attention to the shared experiences of living death across the dis/ability divide while offering generative possibilities for allyship.