This year I took part in the Ladies of Horror Fiction anniversary mini-readathon, and one of the titles I read is going straight into my next class syllabus: Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul by Leila Taylor (2019). What a powerful, insightful, and beautifully written work this is!

Highly recommended.

Here is the official description: “Leila Taylor takes us into the dark heart of the American gothic, analysing the ways it relates to race in America in the twenty-first century. Haunted houses, bitter revenants and muffled heartbeats under floorboards — the American gothic is a macabre tale based on a true story. Part memoir and part cultural critique, Darkly: Blackness and America’s Gothic Soul explores American culture’s inevitable gothicity in the traces left from chattel slavery. The persistence of white supremacy and the ubiquity of Black death feeds a national culture of terror and a perpetual undercurrent of mourning. If the gothic narrative is metabolized fear, if the goth aesthetic is romanticized melancholy, what does that look and sound like in Black America?”

And here is a sample of Taylor’s haunting prose:

The sublimity of the modern ruin lies in its relative newness, the purpose and life of the former building are familiar and recognizable, creating the dichotomy between the attraction and repulsion of our world gone to dust. We see ourselves in a state of decay. We are watching our own death, and in the photographs, ruin-porn websites, documentaries, and horror movies, we become mourners at our own funeral. There is a dark pleasure in this glimpse of the end of civilization, a taste of life after the apocalypse. Eugene Thacker calls this nebulous zone the “world-without-us.” It is a glimpse at what our world would be like without people, a place in which human beings are inconsequential. It’s not that nature doesn’t care about us, or is purposely exhibiting its domination. The world doesn’t even know we’re here. In ruined spaces, nature, the original builder, takes over, defying gravity and eschewing structural integrity, reminding us of what we once were and how small we really are. 

I have an uneasy relationship with ruin porn. There is a guilty pleasure in these images (hence the “porn” connotation), but having grown up in Detroit, it’s uncomfortable seeing my hometown perceived as sociological experiment, an art project, or a bargain-basement real-estate deal. There is a dissonance between my fascination with these images and the circumstances of their making.

- from  Darkly: Black History and America’s Gothic Soul by Leila Taylor (2019)

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