An American Sporror Story: The Proliferation of Fungi in Contemporary American Horror Literature

Abstract

Fungi have proliferated every corner of contemporary culture, from luxury fashion houses to HBO prestige television to the psilocybin research labs reshaping psychiatric medicine, and American horror literature has been tracking this proliferation longer than any of them. In the horror tradition, fungi are not symbols but actors, organisms whose specific biological logic—encompassing decomposition, the dissolution of organism/environment boundaries, and distributed cognition—generates the cultural meanings that attach to them rather than receiving those meanings from the human imagination. Tracing what this project terms “sporror” across a century and a half of American literary history, the argument demonstrates that fungal horror’s most significant contribution to the genre is epistemological. Or, in other words, a sustained, formally precise engagement with what it costs to know systems of power from the inside and what becomes possible when the bounded self’s fiction finally gives way. Reading Poe's “The Fall of the House of Usher” alongside T. Kingfisher's What Moves the Dead (2022), this project traces the genre’s shift from fungi as atmospheric symptom to fungi as ontological agent. VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014) is read through Foucauldian disciplinary power, Turner’s liminality, and mycobiome research to argue that the novel stages the violent collision between institutionally produced selfhood and an environment whose organizing logic is that selfhood's dissolution. Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020) and Rio’s Graveyard Shift (2024) are read through the feminist epistemologies of Fricker, Collins, and Longino to argue that both novels construct a contaminated epistemology in which knowledge of heteropatriarchal power is available only through incorporation into it. The concluding chapter situates sporror within Anthropocene discourse, introducing the Mycocene as the biological deep time fungi have always inhabited and that ecological crisis is making newly visible. Fungal horror does not merely reflect contemporary anxieties about environmental collapse and the fiction of bounded selfhood. It stages their epistemological consequences, and has been doing so, with increasing precision, for longer than the cultural conversation surrounding it has been willing to acknowledge.