Reflections on Gothic Fiction

What happens when the things keeping us alive become the things we can no longer trust? In Gary, West Virginia, residents have described water flowing from their taps thick, yellow and foul-smelling. Some cannot afford the bottled water they need, so a local church helps supply it. In this episode, we journey from Gary and Flint into the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe—and...

Gothic fiction is for thinkers. It asks us to question what we can see, what we are being told, and why we accepted the story in the first place. In this episode, I explore how my understanding of the Gothic has moved beyond the idea of a cultural X-ray. From family myths and government propaganda to the questions within my own novels, Gothic fiction pushes us to look at what is ugly and uncomfort...

What if freedom is an illusion, and every escape simply exchanges one set of constraints for another? We imagine freedom as life without barriers: enough money to go anywhere, enough courage to leave everything behind, or an open wilderness where no one can tell us what to do. But does that kind of freedom actually exist? Beginning with a lottery billboard I passed on my way to cancer surgery, thi...

What happens when the people with power over your life decide your emotions can't be trusted? In Episode 12, I'm talking about the madwoman as a real historical terror, not a Gothic cliche. Women really were institutionalized for hysteria, for refusing husbands, for inheriting money, or for grieving too loudly. The law made it easy, and the asylum became the enforcement mechanism. I walk through h...

Tech Gothic: AI, Algorithms, and the New Haunted World What if artificial intelligence isn't just a technology story, but a Gothic one? In this episode, I'm exploring how the oldest fears in Gothic fiction have quietly migrated into our modern world. The castle became the data centre. The ghost became data. The doppelgänger became digital. We'll start with Frankenstein, but differently...

Part two of our deep dive into Flowers in the Attic, and this time we're going beneath the story to the symbolic world underneath it. Because V. C. Andrews wasn't just writing about four children locked away by their grandmother. She was building a novel where almost nothing is accidental — where paper flowers stand in for the childhood the kids can no longer have, where a beautiful house...

Four children. One attic. Fifty years of readers who couldn't look away — and couldn't say why. This episode is my attempt to finally explain it. Nearly fifty years ago, a thirteen-year-old girl read a book about four children locked in an attic — and never forgot it. This week on Reflections on Gothic Fiction , I'm going back to Flowers in the Attic to ask a question I've never fu...

What if the most unsettling women in Gothic fiction aren't the victims, but the ones who refuse to be one? In Episode 11, Annelise digs into Female Gothic and the writers who used the genre to explore something far more complicated than haunted houses and helpless heroines: power, complicity, and survival. From Daphne du Maurier's magnetic, unresolvable Rebecca and Rachel to Barbara Baynto...

What if the Australian bush was never a place of heroic endurance, but one of the most frightening landscapes in literary history? In Episode 10, Annelise explores Australian Gothic and the dark tradition of writers who refused the romantic pioneer myth. From Barbara Baynton's brutal, claustrophobic bush fiction to the eerie indifference of Picnic at Hanging Rock , this episode unpacks why the...

Vampires and werewolves don't make something Gothic. They just make it scary. And Annelise has had enough of the confusion. In this episode, she makes the case that Gothic and horror are fundamentally different traditions with different aims, different tools, and different questions at their heart, and that mixing them up leads writers to make the wrong decisions all the way through a manuscri...

You think of the American Midwest and you think wholesome, honest, and simple. The heartland. But what if all that openness — that enormous sky, that flat horizon that never arrives — isn't reassuring at all? What if exposure is its own kind of dread? In this episode, Annelise draws on her own time living in Oklahoma to explore Midwestern Gothic: the red dirt, the tornado sirens, the ice storm...

What is the real horror in American Gothic if it's not ghosts and castles? It's the dark history hidden beneath the floorboards? In this episode of Reflections on Gothic Fiction , I step back from regional Gothic traditions like Southern, Appalachian, and Alaskan Gothic to explore the larger tradition they all emerged from: American Gothic itself. Because when Gothic fiction crossed the At...

Into the Cold — Alaskan Gothic and the Terror of the Vast Alaska doesn’t decay. It preserves. And in Gothic fiction, that changes everything. In this episode of Reflections on Gothic Fiction , I explore why Alaskan Gothic deserves to be treated as its own distinct space, separate from the more abstract tradition of Arctic Gothic. This is a landscape that doesn’t symbolize danger; it is danger. Vas...

Why do the moors in Wuthering Heights feel as volatile as Heathcliff himself? Why does the Australian wilderness offer a horror more profound than any haunted house? In this episode, Annelise explores the thin line between setting and "place" in Gothic fiction. From the storm-lashed moors of the English North to the suffocating heat of the American South and the indifferent vastness of the Austral...

This episode was born out of something Annelise feels strongly about. Faith is not the problem. People are. And Gothic fiction captures that like no other tradition. In Episode 4 she traces religion through the gothic tradition, from Matthew Lewis's scandalous The Monk to Flannery O'Connor's violent grace, and introduces one of the most chilling characters in her novel All the River To...

In Appalachian folklore, the crows don't lie. They don't call out unless something is coming. In this episode, Annelise goes deeper into the specific folklore traditions she wove into All the River Took, as a living language that breathes, warns, and bites if you ignore it. She explores the three unwritten rules of the Appalachian wilderness, the crow as omen and messenger, and the figure...

Southern gothic didn't emerge from thin air. It came from writers sitting inside an enormous unprocessed wound in a region where the past refused to stay buried, and the darkness kept surfacing. In this episode, Annelise explores why Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor reached for the gothic mode as the only honest way to write about the American South, before turning to Appalachia — ancient, i...

Reflections on Gothic Fiction launches with writer and author Annelise Stephenson Powell asking the questions at the heart of the entire tradition: what is gothic fiction, where did it come from, and why does it still have such a hold on us? From Horace Walpole's crumbling castle in 1764 to the fog and folklore of the American South, Annelise traces the gothic's remarkable journey through...