Large loose baggy monsters: Communities in the multiplot horror
When Henry James described the Victorian multi-plot novel as “large loose baggy monsters,” he didn’t have twentieth and twenty-first century horror in mind, but the echoing effects of the Gothic on writers like Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, and others. These writers drew on the multiplied plots and perspectives of the Gothic to represent how social worlds were constructed and constrained.
