The prefix “eco‐” seems to repel the word “Gothic”: it implies green, healthy, progressive, virile, and natural where the Gothic is queer and diseased, transfixed by archaic beliefs and practices, and darkly tinted like blood and bruise and tomb. Ecocriticism, or environmentalist literary criticism, once preferred Romantic epiphany to supernatural melodrama, but has now shifted its attention to the environ‐mentality of Gothic writers from Mary Shelley to Margaret Atwood. At the same time, a queer/ deconstructive turn in ecocriticism has illuminated – or, better, adumbrated – what Timothy Morton (2007) has called “dark ecology.”