Books by Roger Luckhurst

The story of the Gothic, from early architecture and literature to the modern horror genre, illustrated by the beautiful, the macabre and the strange.

We spend our lives moving through passages, hallways, corridors, and gangways, yet these channeling spaces do not feature in architectural histories, monographs, or guidebooks. They are overlooked, undervalued, and unregarded, seen as unlovely parts of a building's infrastructure rather than architecture. This book is the first definitive history of the corridor, from its origins in country houses and utopian communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, through reformist Victorian prisons, hospitals, and asylums, to the "corridors of power," bureaucratic labyrinths, and housing estates of the twentieth century. Taking in a wide range of sources, from architectural history to fiction, film, and TV, Corridors explores how the corridor went from a utopian ideal to a place of unease: the archetypal stuff of nightmares.

Companion title to The Astounding Illustrated History of Science Fiction this new book reflects the same roots in Gothic literature but follows a complementary path through the 20th century, featuring a brilliant concoction of movie posters, stills, book covers, fantastic art and incredible timelines.

The zombie has shuffled with dead-eyed, remorseless menace from its beginnings in folklore and primitive superstition to become the dominant image of the undead. Roger Luckhurst sifts material from anthropology, folklore, long-forgotten pulp literature, B-movies, medical history and cultural theory to give a definitive introduction to the zombie.

Alien, that legendary fusion of science fiction and horror, was born out of a terrible monster movie script called Star Beast. Tracing the constellation of talents that came together to produce the film, this book explores how and why this interstellar slasher movie, this old dark house in space, came to coil itself around our darkest imaginings.

Aims to provide evidence of the way in which the literature of the 1990s is constantly engaging in questions of memory and history and the representation of time in the present day. Included are essays on key texts of the 1990s, from Graham Swift's "Last Orders" to Jane Smiley's "A Thousand Acres".