Reflections on Gothic Fiction

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...