Gothic Nostalgia in Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room

The Scottish author Louise Welsh’s crime novel, The Cutting Room, was published in 2002 to immediate critical claim and commercial success. Her follow up, The Second Cut was published in March 2022 and continues her engagement with the Gothic in a manner which suggests “nostalgia” or “longing”. The Cutting Room explores the queer Gothic spaces of contemporary Glasgow through the lens of mystery, the abject and the uncanny. Drawing pointedly on older Gothic texts, Welsh updates these to the twenty-first century, reflecting on the impact of globalisation on the Gothic city. In particular, Welsh’s novel examines the monstrous element of Glasgow as a response to its globalised heteronormative dimensions and to its consumer capitalist agenda. The text makes clear that capitalism and nostalgia (the two being uncannily intertwined), rather than a wrongly defamed queer community, causes critical distress. More so, as will be argued here, the layers of nostalgia that are used to construct and reveal the modern city, are just as likely to be used to hide and “disappear” people and communities deemed undesirable.