The roots of early elemental Gothic reside in a form of meteorological ‘shock and awe’, usually conveyed by thunder and lightning. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) associates elemental weather directly with the creation of monstrosity and extends into icy geographical terrain as a means of bringing to the fore other related extremes: of scale, of fear and of the unknown. That combination of ingredients, forged by Shelley and discussed by us in the Introduction, feeds right through the subsequent history of elemental Gothic and is discussed in this chapter also in relation to Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), M.R. James’ ‘Oh Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’ (1904) and ‘A Warning to the Curious’ (1925), John W. Campbell's ‘Who Goes There?’ (1938), Robert Aickman's ‘Ringing the Changes’ (1964), Susan Hill's The Woman in Black (1983) and Michelle Paver's Dark Matter (2010). As with all four main chapters of this book, we establish a geographical framework for our readings of these literary texts and, in this chapter, the landscape focus is on water (primarily frozen and coastal) and its interface with the geological, elemental and climatological features of the land which meets it. All the texts discussed in this chapter are centred upon very precise topographical features and it is our contention that the haunted nature of the landscapes created therein derives equally precisely from the interface between the human presence, as it travels across its surface, and the frictional trace of human footfall in often conflictual relationship with that terrain. The chapter is subdivided into two sections, ‘The Polar Uncanny’ and ‘Creeping Coastlines’ and begins by extending the discussion of Frankenstein embarked on in the Introduction, now placing Victor Frankenstein's struggle at the heart of an elemental maelstrom.

In 1757, Edmund Burke identified the sublime as that which emanates from ‘Greatness of dimension … Extension … in length, height, or depth’, thus to provoke fear and awe in the beholder (Burke, 1990: 66). Sixty years later, the topographical backdrop Shelley depicts, as Frankenstein engages in a similarly expansive search for his monster towards the end of the novel, could be argued to offer an exemplary literary illustration of the Burkean sublime: ‘I continued with unabated fervour to traverse immense deserts, until the ocean appeared at a distance and formed the utmost boundary of the horizon…Covered with ice, it was only to be distinguished from land by its superior wildness and ruggedness’ (Shelley, 1985: 249). Throughout Frankenstein, Victor's actions play out against a sustained and often ferocious elemental backdrop, suggestive of a kind of divine disquiet at the scientist's sacrilegious ambitions. Gillen D’Arcy Wood reminds us that the summer of 1816, the year when Mary Godwin (later Shelley) and Percy Bysshe Shelley undertook their now famous trip to Geneva, where and when Frankenstein was conceived, came to be known as the ‘Year without a Summer’, due to the eruption of Mount Tambora in the East Indies the previous year. In April 1815, what is now known as ‘the greatest eruption in Earth's recorded history,’ caused a ‘stratospheric ash cloud’ to move across the earth, resulting in ‘a slow-moving sabotage of the global climate system at all latitudes’ (D’Arcy Wood, 2020: 691–92). As a result, Shelley's trip to the Alps in 1816 was cloaked in persistent rain and violent storms, an elemental orchestration that makes its effect felt closely in the fictional landscape of Frankenstein.

Victor, returning to his parental home, following the tragic news of his young brother's murder at the monster's hands, arrives late, only to find the city gates closed. Thus is he