Reflections on Gothic Fiction

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

<p>Vampires and werewolves don't make something Gothic. They just make it scary. And Annelise has had enough of the confusion.</p><p>In this episode, she makes the case that Gothic and horror are fundamentally different...

<p>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...

<p>What is the real horror in American Gothic if it's not ghosts and castles? It's the dark history hidden beneath the floorboards?</p><p>In this episode of Reflections on Gothic Fiction, I step back from regional...

<p>Into the Cold — Alaskan Gothic and the Terror of the Vast</p><p>Alaska doesn’t decay. It preserves. And in Gothic fiction, that changes everything.</p><p>In this episode of Reflections on Gothic Fiction, I explore...

<p>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...

<p>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.</p><p>In Episode 4 she traces religion through the...

<p>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...

<p>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...

<p>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...