Edited Collection – Critical Perspectives on the “Flanaverse” of Mike Flanagan 

In episode 2 of Mike Flanagan’s The Haunting of Hill House (2018), as a young Shirley Crain tearfully clutches a makeshift coffin containing the body of her recently deceased kitten, her parents try to help their grieving child understand mortality. “When we die,” her mother soothes, “we turn into stories. And every time someone tells one of those stories, it’s like we’re still here for them.” Two years later, in episode 6 of Flanagan’s The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), little Flora Wingrave expresses her fear of a faceless child-ghost, whom she’s just discovered in her bedroom, to her own mother and (as far as she knows) uncle. Her uncle, believing the boy to be a “fig-mint” of Flora’s imagination, proposes that she befriend the boy by giving him a name and story of his own. “I had a friend when I was your age, too,” he confides. “In this house, in fact. He was a solider, and I was very afraid of him, until I gave him a story.” “Was he happy when you gave him one?” Flora asks. “Oh,” her uncle replies, “He was.” Finally, in episode 5 of Flanagan’s Midnight Mass (2021), after waking his childhood friend for a row into the ocean from which he knows he will not return, Riley Flynn reflects on the nature of humanity and religion. Primitive man, he says, ended their long days with fires. “And they look out across the valleys, and they see other campfires, just little spots of light in the landscape, and they know that other people are out there, in the dark. And then,” he says, “they see these spots of light in the sky. They don’t know what they are. They don’t have a clue about space or stars or light waves. They just figure they look a hell of a lot like campfires. ‘Who must those people be,’ they wonder. ‘Lightin’ their campfires way up there?’ They start telling each other stories.”

In The Haunting of Hill House, a few dozen feet from Shirley’s kitten memorial, a foreboding mirror occupies a wall of the titular house’s sunroom; while Flora frets over ghosts and stories, the same mirror hangs a floor above her in Bly Manor’s attic; in Midnight Mass, it’s on a stage in the community center where Riley’s fate is sealed. In fact, the ornate mirror—the sinister, haunted Lasser Glass from Flanagan’s 2013 film Oculus—appears in nearly all his projects. The Lasser Glass’s repeated appearance anchors these and more stories about stories about stories across over a decade of Flanagan’s horror oeuvre, constituting a material link in the chain that binds together the entire body of his work—affectionally dubbed by fans the “Flanaverse.”

We seek contributions to an edited collection that will situate the Flanaverse within the narrative frameworks that animate it and the historical contexts that underscore its cultural (and pop-cultural) resonances. One of the key interests of this volume is an exploration of the ways in which Flanagan’s work presents and re-presents mortality and narrative in order to accomplish specific psychological and cultural work. 

Although accepted contributions are welcome to focus on single works in the Flanaverse (both film and television), each essay is expected to draw connections to other works in order to maintain the unity of the overall collection. Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Adaptation analysis that considers Flanagan’s work in relation to its source material (e.g., The Haunting of Bly Manor and its lineages in Henry James’s work, The Fall of the House of Usher and its inspiration throughout various Poe tales, etc.).
• Multimedia studies (to include fandom studies)
• Queer theory
• Labor history
• Spatiality studies
• History of capitalism
• Critical race theory
• Religious studies
• Ecocriticism
• Genre studies
• Studies of gender and/or sexuality
• Waste studies
• Disability studies/crip theory
• Medical humanities
• Digital humanities
• Theorizations of the Gothic or, more broadly, of horror
• Studies of death and dying (Thanatology) 
• Music studies
• Transportation studies
• Childhood Studies 
• Ageing Studies 

Please submit a 500-word abstract, as well as a brief, 150-word author bio, as Word (or PDF) attachments by March 13, 2026. Decisions will be made by April 1, 2026. For accepted proposals, final essays of 5,000-8,000 words will be due on August 1, 2026. As this will be a peer-reviewed collection with an academic press, several rounds of revision and editing may be needed until the final manuscript is ready for publication.

Please send materials, or direct any questions, to Whitney S. May at wm1104@txstate.edu and Bahar Tahamtani at jpm201@txstate.edu.