ABSTRACT
Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) offers a veritable catalog of Gothic conventions: decrepit mansion, mysterious stranger, ancestral curse, clandestine behavior, raging madness, eerie doubling, astonishing grotesqueries, and unavoidable monsters. Furthermore, the narrative diligently locates and challenges a number of limits, which-along with generating horror or terror-is one of the Gothic’s most fundamental maneuvers. Surprisingly, there has been little extended discussion of the novel as explicitly Gothic, but the generic paradigm is inextricably bound up with Fight Club’s thematic concerns and capacity for sparking debate.1
