This article examines the representation of climate change and heroic agency in recent European and North American ecothrillers. Through the use of four literary case studies, it shows how heroic figurations support an idea of climate change as a distinct disastrous event. Moreover,
the heroic is shown to bring out images of a threatening other, usually in the shape of a distinct villain, who gives shape to forms of diffuse, indirect agencies as they are associated with anthropogenic climate change. In addition, the ideal positions of hero and perpetrator are articulated
to larger normative and ideological frameworks, which the heroic figuration frames as irreconcilable. In this regard, markedly similar structures can be observed in novels that seek to present climate change as a genuine threat, such as L. A. Larkin’s Thirst and texts that follow
a climate-sceptic agenda, such as Michael Crichton’s State of Fear. However, this article also shows how the hero’s position towards the sublime, as well as audio-visual tropes of destruction, can entail a tentative reformulation of the recipient, as in Bernard Besson’s
The Greenland Breach. Finally, this article turns to Liz Jensen’s The Rapture, which is shown to follow a plot-driven, suspenseful thriller structure but withdraws heroic or prophetic authority over the disaster it represents and, in doing so, brings out the epistemological
and ethical instability of the spectator’s position.
