Interpreting Gothic Presence Inside the Global War on Terror’s Novels, Comics, Movies, and Video Games Via Trauma Theory

Abstract

This book is a journey remembering, reimagining, and contending with the Global War on Terror (GWOT) via storytelling media from 2002 to 2022. It is a study of how fighters against terrorism, as reflected in 20 years of American storytelling art, are shaped by their extreme experiences at the time of incident and haunted by strange forms later. These battlers of terrorism may be masked vigilantes, New York City Police, FBI, CIA, NCIS, NSA, U.S. military intelligence officers, U.S. army armored infantry and tank corps, U.S. Marines, and U.S. government contracted interrogators, prison administrators, in-country trainers of Afghan or Iraqi national police and security forces, and psychologists. The other criterion for this study is that somewhere the counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency protagonists face paranormal activities in the narratives, ones that engage Gothic art and literature’s preoccupation with the uncanny, decay, disease, despair, death, and return of the repressed. The indisputable point is that something forever follows these protagonists either by what they had to do, or wish they had done, or what they saw and heard and felt. Their wartime behaviors, like their posttraumatic stress, persist and trail them into peacetime. Some are like living ghosts come back to haunt their homeland. Some find that they can only cease being haunted by dying themselves.