In his 1994 novel The Waterworks, E. L. Doctorow constructs a modernGothic tale of horror in the heart of New York City at the end of the nineteenthcentury. Adopting Slavoj Žižek’s “parallax view,” this article contends thatDr. Sartorius’s gory, antagonistic obsession to defeat death constructs a nightmarishnetwork of undead spectral “life” that escapes the ontological horizondelineated by the Symbolic and, at the same time, disrupts its social inscription,rendering visible fin de siècle societal antagonisms. The undead non-subjectswhose materialization is contingent upon the blood and bone marrow of the childrenupon which they prey are used in this modern Gothic text as an exemplificationof the unspeakable Real that is inscribed into the very fabric of capitalism.