Leila Taylor on Shirley Jackson's Haunted Houses, Black Goth, and Being a "Creepy Kid."

Send us Fan MailIn this episode, Leila Taylor, the author of Darkly, an expansive rumination on the relationship between Gothic narratives and the Black experience in America, talks haunted houses courtesy of Shirley Jackson, meditations on a cockroach in a seminal work by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, and being a creepy kid who loved vampires and graveyards. But although Taylor gravitated to Goth culture, she was always aware that the mask never quite fit. “Whiteness was never something I aspired to, but I considered myself a member of this tribe,” she writes in Darkly. “I’ll admit, I sometimes felt a bit Blacula-ish in their presence—a Black version of a white story.”