UK Desk for Arts Express 4-23-25: Gothic Marxism and the ghosts of horror

Sitting down with Greenaway, aka The Lit Crit Guy, for a chat about his new book felt like pulling back the curtain on something we all live in but rarely name: a system so inescapable, so total, that it starts to feel like air — poisoned, pressurised, but invisible unless you stop to really look. And that’s what the book does: it doesn’t just point at late-stage capitalism and say “this is bad,” it opens the trapdoor and drags the whole thing down into the genre it belongs to. Not economics. Not politics. Horror.

Because what is capitalism if not a haunted house? A slow-burn possession? A monster that feeds off every moment of rest you almost had, and every future you thought might still be possible. Greenaway maps it all — from the daily grind to the crisis of meaning, from wage labour to the endless content churn — and makes the case that the scariest part isn’t the chaos. It’s the order. The cold, systemic, spreadsheet-shaped order that knows your worth down to the last decimal and still says, “Not enough.”

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