This is a draft of my article on Julia Kagawa’s richly allusive YA paranormal romance The Iron King. If you’re taking Sam’s Generation Dead module on YA fiction and the Gothic, or if you’re just interested in Gothic and genre generally, you might find it interesting. I explore how the conjunction of different genres in this novel is used to refract a parallel meeting of two ways of thinking about the world that people in today’s society straddle somewhat uncomfortably. There is a modern, scientific world-view that comes into conflict with a yearning for a pre- or anti-modern world-view that is often bound up with environmental concerns. Kagawa’s dark faerie romance (which is also lots of fun) uses clashing literary forms in a way that dramatises these contemporary issues.
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