Reflections on Gothic Fiction

Annelise Stephenson Powell
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Gothic fiction has always known that the dark is where the truth lives. Reflections on Gothic Fiction is a podcast for readers, writers, and anyone who has ever felt more at home in a crumbling mansion than a drawing room. Join professional writer and author Annelise Stephenson Powell for conversations that range from the origins of the Gothic tradition to its darkest modern expressions, exploring the literature, the folklore, and the human compulsion to tell stories that are uncomfortable.

Episodes

  1. Jul 13

    Episode 12: The Gothic Power of Flowers in the Attic — Why We Couldn't Look Away

    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 children locked in an attic — and never forgot it. This week on Reflections on Gothic Fiction, I'm going back to Flowers in the Attic to ask a question I've never fully answered: why does this novel still haunt readers decades later, when so many "shocking" books fade into nothing? The answer isn't the shock value. It's not the doughnuts, or the tar, or even the abuse itself. It's something quieter and stranger — a house that is both prison and sanctuary, a grandmother whose terror is really just a performance of power, and a story that traps us in the same waiting, hoping, and disappointment the children live through. This episode is about what Gothic fiction always does: strip away the beautiful surface and show you what's rotting underneath. Foxworth Hall is elegant. Foxworth Hall is also collapsing. And once you see that contradiction, you can't unsee it anywhere else in the genre. If you've ever wondered why a book you read as a teenager still lives rent-free in your head — this one's for you. And if you write gothic fiction or you want to, my structural guides and workbooks are over at Gothic Writing Studio on Etsy. Serious tools for serious writers. Gothic Writing Studio — structural guides and workbooks for serious gothic fiction writers:⁠⁠ www.etsy.com/shop/GothicWritingStudio⁠⁠ Or a how to write Gothic Fiction book on Amazon: Writing Gothic Fiction — From Classic Castles to Southern Shadows: https://a.co/d/00hF844E

  2. Jun 30

    Episode 11: What Female Gothic is Really About

    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 Baynton's uneasy portrait of femininity in Squeaker's Mate, this episode asks what happens when women in Gothic fiction stop fitting the role they're assigned, and what it means when some women become enforcers of the very systems that harmed them. Plus, Annelise takes a look at how these ideas shaped Lenora and Cassia in her own Southern Gothic novel, All the River Took. And if you write gothic fiction or you want to, Annelise's structural guides and workbooks are over at Gothic Writing Studio on Etsy. Serious tools for serious writers. Gothic Writing Studio — structural guides and workbooks for serious gothic fiction writers:⁠ www.etsy.com/shop/GothicWritingStudio⁠ Or a how to write Gothic Fiction book on Amazon: Writing Gothic Fiction — From Classic Castles to Southern Shadows: https://a.co/d/00hF844E

  3. Jun 16

    Episode 10: Australian Gothic and the Fear of the Interior

    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 vast Australian interior became such fertile ground for fear, and why that fear feels so disturbingly plausible. No supernatural monsters required. Just distance, silence, and the very real horror of being too far from help.

  4. Jun 3

    Episode 9: Stop Calling It Gothic — The Horror Problem

    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 manuscript. What does horror actually want from you? What does Gothic actually want? And why does getting that wrong matter for anyone who wants to write seriously in this tradition? She also talks about her book Writing Gothic Fiction — From Classic Castles to Southern Shadows — what's in it, why frustration drove her to write it, and what she means when she says most writers find the furniture but throw away the house. Writing Gothic Fiction is available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/06PeBe8p

  5. May 26

    Episode 8: Red Dirt and Dark Skies — Midwestern Gothic

    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 storms nobody warns you about. And the history sitting underneath all of it: the Trail of Tears, the Dust Bowl, and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre — grief that soaked into the soil and never quite left. From Willa Cather to Marilynne Robinson, this is the Gothic tradition that looks at America's heartland myth and asks what's actually buried there. And if you write gothic fiction or you want to, my structural guides and workbooks are over at Gothic Writing Studio on Etsy. Serious tools for serious writers. Gothic Writing Studio — structural guides and workbooks for serious gothic fiction writers: www.etsy.com/shop/GothicWritingStudio Writing Gothic Fiction — From Classic Castles to Southern Shadows: https://a.co/d/00hF844E

  6. May 12

    Episode 7: Born in the Dark — The American Gothic Tradition

    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 Atlantic, it had to reinvent itself. America had no castles, no aristocracy, no ancient abbeys slowly rotting in the fog. What it had instead was wilderness, Puritan guilt, violence, dispossession, isolation, and histories people were already trying to bury. From Charles Brockden Brown and Washington Irving to Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, Toni Morrison, and Stephen King, this episode traces how American Gothic developed into a tradition obsessed with what refuses to stay hidden. We explore:• why American Gothic feels psychologically different from European Gothic• how guilt and inherited violence shaped the tradition• why the landscape itself became Gothic• the blurred line between Gothic fiction and horror• and how Southern Gothic, Appalachian Gothic, and other regional traditions grew out of these foundations If you’ve ever wondered why American Gothic feels so haunted, even when there are no ghosts, this episode is for you. 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/GothicWritingStudio My books are also available on Amazon ⁠⁠⁠Click Here⁠⁠

  7. Apr 29

    Episode 6: Into the Cold — Alaskan Gothic and the Terror of the Vast

    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. 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/GothicWritingStudio My books are also available on Amazon ⁠⁠⁠Click Here⁠⁠

  8. Apr 15

    Episode 5: The Land Has a Voice — Place as Character in Gothic Fiction

    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/GothicWritingStudio My books are also available on Amazon ⁠⁠Click Here⁠⁠

  9. Apr 1

    Episode 4: The God-Shaped Dark — Religion, Control, and the Gothic Tradition

    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/GothicWritingStudio My books are also available on Amazon ⁠Click Here⁠

  10. Mar 19

    Episode 3: The Crows Know — Folklore as Living Language in Appalachian Gothic

    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/GothicWritingStudio My books are also available on Amazon ⁠Click Here⁠

  11. Mar 19

    Episode 2: Roots and Rot — Southern Gothic, Appalachian Folklore, and the Stories the Mountains Keep

    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/GothicWritingStudio My books are also available on Amazon ⁠Click Here⁠

  12. Mar 19

    Episode 1: What is Gothic Fiction and Why Do We Love It?

    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/GothicWritingStudio My books are also available on Amazon Click Here

  • 12 Episodes

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

Gothic fiction has always known that the dark is where the truth lives. Reflections on Gothic Fiction is a podcast for readers, writers, and anyone who has ever felt more at home in a crumbling mansion than a drawing room. Join professional writer and author Annelise Stephenson Powell for conversations that range from the origins of the Gothic tradition to its darkest modern expressions, exploring the literature, the folklore, and the human compulsion to tell stories that are uncomfortable.

Information

  • Creator
    Annelise Stephenson Powell
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    12
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Annelise Stephenson Powell
  • Show Website
    Reflections on Gothic Fiction