https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.064
Ecohorror and Displacement in Anoushka Khan’s Still Life
ARNAB CHATTERJEE
Guest Faculty, Department of English
Murshidabad Maharaja Krishnanath University, Berhampore
chatterjeeac774@gmail.com
ORCID: 0009-0006-3374-9693
Abstract: This paper will attempt to examine Anoushka Khan’s graphic novel Still Life (2021) to showcase how the narrative portrays horror and trauma primarily through the incorporation of ecology. Through the lens of ecohorror and ecological trauma, this paper will argue how the narrative constructs horror not through spectacle but through environmental stillness. Still Life illustrates the story of Pinky, who leaves her home in the suburban setting to go look for her missing husband, Pasha, in his rural childhood home. Drawing on affect theory and ecocritical approaches, the paper will demonstrate how states of silence, stagnation, and temporal suspension produce an eerie atmosphere. This atmospheric stillness further operates as an affective condition that generates uncertainty and estrangement, reconfiguring climate crisis as a form of lived psychological horror. In this way, this paper will attempt to argue how Still Life constructs a form of ecohorror rooted not in spectacle or catastrophe but in the environmental stillness that produces an eerie affective condition to the narrator as well as the readers. The narrative also portrayed nature through emotions of love, isolation, melancholy, and loss to create a visual world that is extraordinarily unsettling. Moreover, this paper will attempt to illustrate how the environment, rather than serving as a passive backdrop, emerges as an active site of trauma, encoding loss, decay, and instability. By conceptualising the narrator’s experience from the suburban to the rural as an affective and uncanny experience, the paper attempts to contribute to the emerging discussions in environmental humanities and horror studies.
Keywords: Ecohorror, Ecology, Memory, Trauma, Graphic Novel
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