‘She would never fall, because her friend was flying with her’: Gothic Hybridity, Queer Girls and Exceptional States in Helen Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl (2005) and M. R. Carey’s The Girl with all the Gifts (2014)

This chapter explores multiple contexts in a comparative analysis of Helen Oyeyemi’s 2005 novel The Icarus Girl and M.R. Carey’s 2014 novel, The Girl with All the Gifts. After demonstrating why each of these texts belongs to the New Queer Gothic (A genre and mode of reading fiction coined by the author), this work will show how these texts are important to an investigation into the representation of girlhood subjectivity within that genre. This chapter will then debate each novel’s use of Gothic hybridity and exceptionality, analysing the ways in which the novels represent the trauma of wider issues connected to biopolitics. The arguments of this chapter will synthesise theory from Gorgio Agamben and Frantz Fanon, among others, to underscore the questions of fraught identity politics, ontology, and ethics extant in New Queer Gothic fiction. This comparative analytical study will make the case that reading such fiction via Queer criticism and feminist thinking can significantly broaden our understanding of real-world issues.