To speak of ‘American urban gothic’ is to yoke together three overdetermined words and use them to account for works in multiple media, produced in different places and different times. It is to imply that Charles Brockden Brown's novel Arthur Mervyn (1798–9) has affinities with the Hollywood film I Am Legend (2007), and that both have something in common with Dion Boucicault's melodrama The Poor of New York (1857), H. P. Lovecraft's story ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ (1927), and Kara Walker's installation A Subtlety (2014). It is to argue that adjectives routinely enlisted to characterize the gothic – ‘uncanny’, ‘mysterious’, ‘horrifying’, ‘evil’ – also frequently characterize the American city in art. Toni Morrison has remarked that ‘it is striking how dour, how troubled, how frightened and haunted our early and founding literature truly is’ (Morrison 1993: 35), and although her central example of Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) takes place far from any American cities, her observation nonetheless applies with special force to early American urban literature. It continues to apply now: reading Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011), set in the ruins of post-apocalyptic New York, or watching The Dark Knight Rises (2012), with its revolutionary monster lurking in Gotham's sewers, one notes the centuries-long persistence of gothic anxieties in the imagined American city.

This chapter focuses on literature of the late antebellum period, since the two decades between 1840 and 1860 comprise a key moment in the development of American urban gothic as a subgenre. In those decades, a community of writers that was producing ‘sensational pamphlet- novels aimed at a large, mainly lower-class audience’ (Bell 1995: 71) organized an already extant urban gothic vocabulary into a popular and influential literary subgenre, the city-mysteries, that ostentatiously announced its link to the gothic novel. These city-mysteries were intimately intertwined with other discourses, notably the urban reportage of the so-called ‘flash press’, and other art forms, especially the stage. Ned Buntline's novel The Mysteries and Miseries of New York (1849), for instance, shares hypermasculine gender politics with the flash press and borrows two key characters, Mose the Bowery B'hoy and his lover Lize, from Benjamin Baker's 1848 stage hit A Glance at New York.