For episode four, we welcome the acclaimed novelist and scholar Victoria Nelson. Nelson is the academic doyen of what is today labeled Occulture Studies. Her first monograph on the supernatural in popular culture, The Secret Life of Puppets (2001), practically willed the field into existence. The follow-up book, Gothicka (2012), theorized shifts in popular culture that we are living through today. In this interview we discuss Victoria’s early life, her first forays into fiction, and explore expressions of what Nelson terms the “repressed supernatural” in androids, vampires, and hyperreal religions.

Victoria Nelson is a writer of fiction, criticism, and memoir. Her books include The Secret Life of Puppets, a study of the supernatural grotesque in Western culture that won the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies in 2002, and Gothicka, which won the Association of American Publishers PROSE (Professional and Scholarly Excellence)Award in Literature in 2012. A novel, Neighbor George, came out in 2021. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2016 and teaches in Goddard College’s MFA creative writing program.

####Show Notes
Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets
V. Nelson, Gothicka
V. Nelson, Neighbor George
Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories
Victoria Nelson on the Weird Studies Podcast
Stephenie Meyer, The Twilight Saga
Harold Bloom, The American Religion
The website of Paul Selig