ABSTRACT
This chapter considers McGrath’s early short story “Blood Disease” (1988) and his first novel The Grotesque (1989), exploring the relationship in these texts between gothic figurations of the “unhealthy disabled” (Wendell 2013), trajectories of imperial expansion and exploration, and the reworked tropes of vampirism that mediate between these narrative strands. Noting that McGrath’s signature interest in themes of madness has tended to emerge in texts that incarnate psychic discord as bodily difference, the chapter begins by mapping the field in which gothic—and disability—studies might be brought into contact. From here, the chapter situates gothic figures of the “unhealthy disabled” in the context of McGrath’s reappropriation of imperial gothic forms, showing that these characters both refer to and subvert the politics of such forms in their fin de siècle iterations. The chapter concludes by drawing attention to the ambivalent invocations of blood that circulate throughout McGrath’s narratives of disability and empire, suggesting these place the real locus of anxiety not at the colonial periphery but within Britain itself and specifically within fraught relations of class, which are examined through complex tropes of vampirism.
