Hogue argues that Florida authors employ the Gothic mode to examine the long history of trauma and loss shadowing the state’s sunny public image. She examines Francis Parkman’s Pioneers of France in the New World, Lafcadio Hearn’s ‘To the Fountain of Youth,’ Peter Matthiessen’s Killing Mister Watson, Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, exploring how these works patrol the borders between civilization and savagery, known and unknown, and life and death, finding in Florida monstrous Others mirroring darkness thrown into sharp relief by the bright Florida sun.