ABSTRACT
Within children’s fiction, the comic Gothic can no longer be ignored, so prevalent has it become in the last 15 years or so. Indeed, the genre is gaining in popularity in these early years of the twenty-first century, arguably because of millennial anxieties adding to fin de siecle uncertainty, ambiguity and paradox (Edmundson 1997: 3). Many texts aimed at older junior readers (around ten years of age and above), most part of a series or which have sequels, now incorporate the mix of “horror,” “humour,” and the Gothic. Perhaps the best known is Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events (started in 1999), featuring the three Baudelaire orphans and their ghastly guardian, Count Olaf, who seeks continually to gain their inheritance by nefarious means. Of course, the comic Gothic is not altogether new, even for this age group of readers. Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach (1961) features cruel, child-hating guardians in the form of Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker, and dark, even black, humour, but it was not until the late 1980s and 1990s that the comic Gothic as a genre took off for junior readers.
