Reflections on Gothic Fiction

Into the Cold — Alaskan Gothic and the Terror of the VastAlaska 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. Vast, indifferent, and completely unconcerned with whether you survive it.We trace the roots of this emerging tradition through the Klondike Gold Rush, where extreme conditions exposed the darker edges of human nature, and through the work of Jack London and Robert William Service, who captured the psychological reality of life in the North.I also look at what makes this subgenre so unsettling — scale, isolation, prolonged darkness, and a cold that doesn’t destroy, but preserves. In Alaska, the past doesn’t disappear. It waits.Finally, I touch on contemporary writers like Eowyn Ivey and Jamey Bradbury, and how they continue to shape this evolving Gothic space. If you enjoy thinking seriously about writing and storytelling, I have a range of writing guidebooks available in my Etsy shop — https://www.etsy.com/shop/GothicWritingStudioMy books are also available on Amazon ⁠⁠⁠Click Here⁠⁠

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 Australian Bush, we discover how the landscape watches, waits, and eventually, speaks.Join us as we trace the bones of the Gothic through the works of Brontë, Hawthorne, Faulkner, and Baynton, before looking toward the frozen, absolute darkness of a rising subgenre: Alaskan Gothic.If you enjoy thinking seriously about writing and storytelling, I have a range of writing guidebooks available in my Etsy shop — https://www.etsy.com/shop/GothicWritingStudioMy books are also available on Amazon ⁠⁠Click Here⁠⁠

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 Took: Elder Hiram McBride, a man who has mistaken his own need for power for the voice of God.If you enjoy thinking seriously about writing and storytelling, I have a range of writing guidebooks available in my Etsy shop — https://www.etsy.com/shop/GothicWritingStudioMy books are also available on Amazon ⁠Click Here⁠

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 of the mountain elder who holds the old knowledge the rest of the world has forgotten. Along the way, she reads directly from her novel, tracing how folklore shapes the story from the very first chapter to its darkest moments. This is Gothic fiction doing what it does best — taking the dark seriously, and trusting that the truth lives there.If you enjoy thinking seriously about writing and storytelling, I have a range of writing guidebooks available in my Etsy shop — https://www.etsy.com/shop/GothicWritingStudioMy books are also available on Amazon ⁠Click Here⁠

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, isolated, and home to an extraordinary folk tradition where storytelling was survival and the dead didn't always leave. She also shares how Pikeville, Kentucky, opened her up to Appalachian folklore and how the pull of that landscape led her to write All the River Took.If you enjoy thinking seriously about writing and storytelling, I have a range of writing guidebooks available in my Etsy shop — https://www.etsy.com/shop/GothicWritingStudioMy books are also available on Amazon ⁠Click Here⁠

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 literary history — a tradition born as a rebellion against reason, shaped by the Romantics, darkened by the Victorians, and evolved into something that belongs to every culture that has ever had ghosts it couldn't name. She also gets personal, sharing the moment gothic fiction claimed her and why Southern Gothic, above all its subgenres, became the tradition she first wrote in.Conversational, literary, and unafraid of the dark. Welcome to the beginning.If you enjoy thinking seriously about writing and storytelling, I have a range of writing guidebooks available in my Etsy shop — https://www.etsy.com/shop/GothicWritingStudioMy books are also available on Amazon Click Here