Episode 18: When the Monster is Everywhere

Why do Gothic heroines so often trust the wrong people, surrender their judgment, or remain silent when something is clearly wrong?In this episode of Reflections on Gothic Fiction, I explore the relationship between obedience, female autonomy, and the responsibility mothers have to protect their daughters.Through Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Erika T. Wurth's White Horse, we examine what happens when the people entrusted with a daughter's welfare fail to protect her, and how unquestioning obedience can leave women vulnerable to abuse.I also reflect on the modern tradwife movement on social media and the troubling idea that preparing daughters for marriage and motherhood should come at the expense of their education and independence.Because perhaps the question isn't why Gothic heroines make such unwise decisions, but who taught them that they had no right to question authority in the first place.Content note: Discussion of domestic abuse, parental violence, and coercive control. Contains novel spoilers.

The Gothic Art of Living With GriefWhy are we so uncomfortable talking about death and grief? And why do we expect people to move on from loss as though sorrow has an expiry date?In this episode of Reflections on Gothic Fiction, I explore how Gothic literature gives grief a voice, a presence, and sometimes even a body. Through Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven and Gerardo Sámano Córdova's Monstrilio, alongside Mikki Brammer's beautiful literary novel The Collected Regrets of Clover, we consider how literature confronts the realities of death that modern society often prefers to avoid.Perhaps grief isn't always something we need to overcome. Perhaps it's something we learn to live alongside, while continuing to love, grow, and find happiness.

What happens when the things keeping us alive become the things we can no longer trust?In Gary, West Virginia, residents have described water flowing from their taps thick, yellow and foul-smelling. Some cannot afford the bottled water they need, so a local church helps supply it.In this episode, we journey from Gary and Flint into the food we eat, the water we drink, and the air we breathe—and ask how fiction is recording the terror, anger, and grief of living with a monster too large to name.What do you do when you cannot escape the haunted house because it has expanded to contain us all?

Gothic fiction is for thinkers. It asks us to question what we can see, what we are being told, and why we accepted the story in the first place.In this episode, I explore how my understanding of the Gothic has moved beyond the idea of a cultural X-ray. From family myths and government propaganda to the questions within my own novels, Gothic fiction pushes us to look at what is ugly and uncomfortable, acknowledge what has been hidden, and keep asking: What else is true?

What if freedom is an illusion, and every escape simply exchanges one set of constraints for another? We imagine freedom as life without barriers: enough money to go anywhere, enough courage to leave everything behind, or an open wilderness where no one can tell us what to do. But does that kind of freedom actually exist?Beginning with a lottery billboard I passed on my way to cancer surgery, this episode explores the difference between freedom and agency, and the possibility that what we call freedom is merely the successful exchange of intolerable constraints for tolerable ones.Through Jack London’s “In a Far Country” and Velma Wallis’s Two Old Women — two non-Gothic works containing powerful Gothic elements — we consider what happens when people leave civilization behind, only to discover that the wilderness imposes its own demands.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/GothicWritingStudio⁠⁠Or a how to write Gothic Fiction book on Amazon: Writing Gothic Fiction — From Classic Castles to Southern Shadows: https://a.co/d/00hF844E

What happens when the people with power over your life decide your emotions can't be trusted?In Episode 12, I'm talking about the madwoman as a real historical terror, not a Gothic cliche.Women really were institutionalized for hysteria, for refusing husbands, for inheriting money, or for grieving too loudly. The law made it easy, and the asylum became the enforcement mechanism.I walk through how this fear evolved from 18th-century towers to 19th-century attics, from Bedlam's iron bars to Charlotte Brontë's Thornfield Hall, from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's yellow wallpaper to Jean Rhys's reclamation of Bertha Mason's voice. We'll trace the legal frameworks that made women vulnerable — the 1845 Lunacy Act, coverture laws, and medical testimonies about women's "hysterical" biology. We'll look at how Gothic houses became psychological systems, how environments create emotional distortion, and why some Gothic women aren't innocent victims but become frightening under pressure.This is about power and who gets to define sanity. It's about what happens when you lose control of your own story.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/GothicWritingStudio⁠⁠Or a how to write Gothic Fiction book on Amazon: Writing Gothic Fiction — From Classic Castles to Southern Shadows: https://a.co/d/00hF844E

Tech Gothic: AI, Algorithms, and the New Haunted WorldWhat 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 migrated into our modern world. The castle became the data centre. The ghost became data. The doppelgänger became digital.We'll start with Frankenstein, but differently. Rather than a failed experiment, we look at it as a successful story whose consequences its creator never understood. From there, we'll trace that same anxiety through deepfakes and digital doubles, the strange new hauntings of social media profiles that outlive their owners, and the almost supernatural way people talk about "the algorithm" — as if it were an invisible force acting on their lives.Along the way we'll touch on Blade Runner, Neuromancer, Ex Machina, and Black Mirror, and ask why so much of our modern unease sounds like it was lifted straight from a Gothic novel.Because Gothic fiction has never really been about castles or monsters. It's about what happens when we create something we can't fully control, and that question is more relevant now than ever.

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 grandmother. She was building a novel where almost nothing is accidental — where paper flowers stand in for the childhood the kids can no longer have, where a beautiful house hides something that's quietly died beneath its surface, and where an attic becomes both a prison and a sanctuary at the same time.We'll look at how the title itself works as a symbol, why the family's outward respectability matters so much, and how this novel sits alongside Gothic classics like The Picture of Dorian Gray and Rebecca in asking one central question: how long can something keep looking alive after life has already left it?This is Gothic fiction at its core which is not interested in surfaces, but in what we hide beneath them.Writing Gothic Fiction: From Classic Castles to Southern Shadows: https://a.co/d/08YKA9XC

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/GothicWritingStudio⁠⁠Or a how to write Gothic Fiction book on Amazon: Writing Gothic Fiction — From Classic Castles to Southern Shadows: https://a.co/d/00hF844E

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/GothicWritingStudio⁠Or a how to write Gothic Fiction book on Amazon: Writing Gothic Fiction — From Classic Castles to Southern Shadows: https://a.co/d/00hF844E