ABSTRACT
In Rory Power’s young adult (YA) standalone novel Wilder Girls (2019), a highly contagious disease referred to as the Tox is contained on Raxter, an isolated island. Once home to a private school for girls, Raxter is now a quarantine area where the former students struggle to survive. The Tox originated in a prehistoric worm that, due to climate change, crawls out of its icy home and takes hold of every living thing on Raxter. In Wilder Girls, anthropogenic climate change compromises the environment, bringing forth a pandemic infection that mutates everything it touches and creates a monstrous and predatory vision of nature. In this dystopian world, nature becomes a Gothic site. By critically engaging with the ecoGothic, this chapter examines the intersections between Gothic imagination and nature and, most importantly, argues that this connection intertwines with environmental awareness. Through considering key concepts, such as ecophobia, unheimlich, posthumanism, and speciesism, this analysis argues that Wilder Girls calls for a turn to ecocentrism by depicting a bleak, consuming nature and an environmental disease.
