ABSTRACT
The Caribbean Gothic is uniquely suited to unveiling the psychology of colonialism: the master's fear of the subaltern, the patriarchal suppression of other nonconforming agencies and subjectivities, and the violence that necessarily underpins an economy of slavery, commodification, and extraction. By contrast, the Puerto Rican/Dominican author Pedro Cabiya turns away from psychological expressions of the Gothic. Cabiya's take on the Gothic veers toward the visceral, abject, and even risible grotesque, in which body and landscape are consumed in a market-driven cannibal orgy. Cabiya achieves an effect of double abjection by not only rendering the human body in mechanical terms, but also by describing electrical or mechanical activity in human terms. If romantic fiction is a category of classics, the zombie genre is a market phenomenon. The continual resurgence and repurposing of vampires, cannibals, and zombies throughout history shows us that the utility of the Gothic and of its monsters is unlimited.
