Extremist Nostalgia: Mike Ma’s Novellas as Twenty-First-Century Far-Right Gothic

A Gothic longing for and fear of the past saturates global political, social and cultural discourse. This essay investigates how such anxieties and longing are exploited for political and ideological purposes by far-Right extremism in the USA. It uses the lens of the Gothic to explore two of the most widely read works of fiction that have emerged from that milieu: Mike Ma’s Harassment Architecture (2019) and Gothic Violence (2021). The novellas represent far-Right extremist violence and have been published and circulated widely in the vast digital network of the far-Right including on ecofascist and accelerationist reading lists. They are steeped in the toxic nostalgia that permeates far-Right discourse, and position militant accelerationism leading to a return to an invented pre-modern life as a corrective to the supposed ills of modernity. By approaching Ma’s novellas as Gothic epics, this chapter reveals the ways that individual and social transformation are interlinked and depend on what is imagined, in both those books and the far-Right milieu more broadly, as a successful reclamation of nostalgically longed-for white masculine violence.