Mention Gothic fiction and certain images probably come immediately to mind.

A crumbling mansion.

A woman wandering through a hallway in a nightgown with a candle trembling in her hand.

Fog. Cemeteries. Family secrets. Portraits whose eyes seem to follow you across the room.

And listen, I love all that shit.

But Gothic fiction has never really been about the creepy house.

The house is usually trying to tell us something.

For more than 250 years, Gothic writers have used haunted castles, decaying estates, ghosts, monsters, forbidden rooms, oppressive families, supernatural forces, and unreliable perceptions to explore fears that are much harder to contain: death, sexuality, religion, science, race, colonization, gender, inheritance, repression, and the terrible possibility that the past isn’t actually past.

That last one matters quite a bit to me.

Because when I began writing The Forgotten Bruja, I wasn’t necessarily sitting at my desk thinking, How many Gothic conventions can I shove into this book?

I was thinking about inheritance.

About mothers and daughters.

About the stories families bury.

About land that remembers what people would rather forget.

About a woman who spent years believing freedom meant getting as far away from home as possible, only to discover that distance does not necessarily sever what made you.

And the deeper I got into Isadora Espinal’s story, the clearer it became:

I was writing a Gothic novel.

So What Exactly Is Gothic Fiction?

Gothic fiction emerged as a recognizable literary genre during the eighteenth century, combining mystery, terror, heightened emotion, strange or supernatural occurrences, ominous settings, and questions about morality and human nature. The Castle of Otranto, published by Horace Walpole in 1764, is conventionally identified as the first Gothic novel and helped establish many of the conventions readers still associate with the genre.

But defining Gothic fiction by its props misses the point.

A castle does not make something Gothic.

Neither does a ghost.

What makes Gothic especially interesting is what those things represent.

Gothic stories frequently place characters inside environments shaped by something unresolved. There may be a family secret. A crime. An inherited curse. A forbidden desire. An abusive patriarch. A historical injustice. Something has been buried (sometimes literally—hello, Ordinary Bruja), and the story begins when it refuses to stay buried.

That is why houses become almost alive in Gothic fiction.

They hold history.

Rooms conceal knowledge.

Documents reveal competing versions of the past.

Family bloodlines become dangerous.

The supernatural challenges whatever characters believed was rational or possible.

And the protagonist is often trapped between knowing and not wanting to know.

The terror comes from crossing that threshold anyway.

The Gothic Begins: Castles, Tyrants and Women Who Ask Too Many Questions

Early Gothic fiction loved a castle.

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto established the medieval architecture, supernatural interventions, threatened inheritance, family secrets, and oppressive patriarch that would become staples of the genre. Writers such as Ann Radcliffe later developed Gothic fiction through novels including The Mysteries of Udolpho in 1794, emphasizing atmosphere, psychological terror, mystery, isolation, and threatened women.

These early stories were full of locked doors, secret passageways, corrupt authority figures, and women trying to understand what was happening around them.

Which is something worth noticing.

Because Gothic fiction has always been interested in power.

Who possesses it?

Who is trapped beneath it?

Who controls the story?

And what happens when someone starts investigating the things they have been instructed not to question?

That foundation made Gothic uniquely adaptable.

Once writers realized the castle could represent something larger, you didn’t actually need the castle anymore.

You just needed something capable of holding secrets.

A family could do that.

A town could do that.

A country could certainly do that.

Frankenstein Changed the Monster

By the nineteenth century, Gothic fiction was already evolving beyond medieval castles.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818, retained Gothic atmosphere and terror while introducing anxieties surrounding scientific ambition, creation, responsibility, alienation, and what happens when human beings acquire the power to make something without accepting responsibility for what they have made.

And that creates one of my favorite questions in horror:

Who is actually the monster?

The creature?

Or the person who created the circumstances that made the creature monstrous?

Gothic literature keeps returning to some version of that question.

Later writers, including Edgar Allan Poe, brought the Gothic deeper into the human mind. Madness, guilt, obsession, death, and unreliable perception became their own haunted houses. Poe’s Gothic work helped move terror inward, proving that sometimes you don’t need something chasing the protagonist through a corridor.

Sometimes the corridor is inside the protagonist. (You will see this in The Reluctant Bruja)

By the end of the nineteenth century, works such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Bram Stoker’s Dracula were using Gothic conventions to explore duality, forbidden appetites, morality, identity and fears surrounding social and cultural change.

The Gothic monster kept changing because the fears surrounding it kept changing.

Then the Castle Crossed the Atlantic

When Gothic traditions developed in the United States, American writers found plenty of ghosts already waiting for them.

American Gothic became entangled with histories of slavery, racism, religious extremism, violence, national identity and the contradictions between America’s stated ideals and its actual history. Scholarship on nineteenth-century British and American Gothic increasingly examines how race and slavery operate within that tradition rather than treating them as peripheral concerns.

Southern Gothic developed its own recognizable branch of that tradition, using decaying estates, grotesque characters, damaged families, poverty, violence and social hypocrisy to confront the legacies embedded in the American South.

The crumbling castle became the plantation house.

The hereditary curse could become generational trauma.

The family secret could become an entire community’s carefully edited version of history.

And that evolution demonstrates something essential about the genre:

Gothic travels.

It does not need eighteenth-century Europe to survive.

It needs a past that continues interfering with the present.

But Gothic Also Has a Colonial Problem

This is where the history gets more complicated.

Gothic literature developed alongside European imperialism, and colonial places, racialized people, foreign religions and cultural practices were frequently transformed into sources of danger or exotic terror within European Gothic fiction. Scholars of colonial and postcolonial Gothic have pointed out how deeply the genre’s history became intertwined with empire, racial difference and European anxieties about the people and territories it colonized.

Basically?

Sometimes Gothic’s monster was simply the Other.

The foreigner.

The racialized person.

The supposedly primitive religion.

The person colonial society did not understand and therefore decided to fear.

That’s an uncomfortable part of the genre’s history, but I don’t think we should run away from it.

Because something really interesting happens when writers from the cultures that were once positioned as Gothic threats begin using the Gothic for themselves.

The camera turns around, and that’s what I’m doing with Las Cerradoras Saga.

Because now the ‘other’ is the one writing it, and now I am examining why the monster or the fear was the foreign woman? And why does society needs her to be?

In my gothic stories, I am not treating ancestral practices as evidence of savagery.

I am asking who decided one belief system was respectable while another was superstition.

I am not using colonial history as spooky wallpaper.

I am opening the fucking walls.

The Rise of Postcolonial, Black and Global Gothic

Contemporary Gothic fiction has increasingly become a powerful way to examine colonialism, racial violence, displacement, cultural erasure and inherited trauma.

Postcolonial Gothic, in particular, can take conventions once shaped by colonial anxieties and redirect them toward the violence of colonialism itself. Rather than presenting colonized people or their practices as the frightening unknown, the horror can emerge from conquest, exploitation, racism, cultural suppression and histories that dominant societies would prefer to forget.

Black Gothic writers have similarly used the genre to confront the realities and afterlives of anti-Black violence. Contemporary scholarship now examines Black Gothic as a literary tradition capable of expressing racial terror not merely through metaphorical monsters, but through the very real social structures producing that terror.

And Gothic has expanded far beyond Britain and the United States.

Scholars increasingly discuss World Gothic or Globalgothic, examining how writers across cultures adapt Gothic traditions to their own histories, landscapes, religions, political realities and experiences with colonialism, migration and cultural identity.

One of the most recognizable contemporary examples is Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, which takes recognizable Gothic architecture and atmosphere while connecting its horrors to colonialism, extraction, race and power in Mexico. Scholarship examining the novel specifically identifies its haunted landscape with histories of British neocolonial exploitation and resource extraction.

That’s the Gothic doing what it has always done best.

Changing the haunted house while keeping the haunting.

Modern Gothic Is About What Refuses to Stay Buried

This is why I think reducing Gothic fiction to an aesthetic does the genre a disservice.

Yes, Gothic can be beautiful.

Give me moss.

Give me candles.

Give me an enormous decaying house with twelve bedrooms and one door nobody is supposed to open.

I’m coming in.

But the aesthetic works because decay means something.

A Gothic house is rarely simply old.

It is carrying something.

Modern Gothic fiction can use homes, communities, bodies, landscapes, governments, churches, archives and families as repositories for unresolved history.

Sometimes the ghost is literal.

Sometimes the ghost is generational trauma.

Sometimes it’s racism.

Sometimes it’s colonialism.

Sometimes it’s grief.

Sometimes it’s shame.

Sometimes it’s the story your mother refused to tell you because her mother refused to tell her.

And sometimes it’s all of those things sitting at the dinner table together.

Which Brings Me to The Forgotten Bruja

The Forgotten Bruja takes place primarily in 1968 and follows Isadora Espinal, a Dominican woman who returns to Willowshade, Ohio, after the death of her mother, Altagracia.

Isadora has spent years building a life away from the Espinal estate.

Away from her mother’s expectations.

Away from the strange responsibilities associated with her family.

Away from the magic she never asked to inherit.

She believes leaving made her free.

Then she comes home.

And discovers that home remembers her.

The Espinal estate stands on land possessing a magic older than the family occupying it. The hill reacts to those who enter it. Documents contradict the town’s official history. Family stories don’t align with what Isadora begins uncovering in archives. Her mother’s belongings contain answers that create even more questions.

And everywhere she turns, Isadora encounters evidence that the version of the past she inherited is incomplete.

That structure places The Forgotten Bruja squarely within the Gothic tradition.

There is an inherited estate.

A death that brings the protagonist home.

A family legacy she doesn’t fully understand.

Documents revealing buried history.

Unreliable versions of the past.

An oppressive town.

Supernatural manifestations.

Generational secrets.

A landscape functioning almost like a character.

A protagonist caught between rational explanation and increasingly undeniable evidence that something impossible is happening.

But the Gothic question underneath all of that isn’t simply:

Is this place haunted?

It is:

Who gets remembered?

And perhaps more importantly:

Who benefits when someone is forgotten?

My Haunted House Is Also a Family

One of the central conflicts in The Forgotten Bruja involves Isadora’s understanding of freedom.

For most of her adult life, freedom has meant leaving.

Leaving her mother.

Leaving Willowshade.

Leaving the expectations surrounding the Espinal women.

Leaving America for France.

But Gothic fiction loves dragging people home.

Because you can move three thousand miles away from a house and still carry the house around inside you.

Isadora must confront not only what her mother expected from her, but also what she misunderstood about the women who came before her.

That makes the story domestic Gothic as much as supernatural Gothic.

The Espinal women love one another.

They also hurt one another.

They protect.

They manipulate.

They withhold information because they believe withholding it will protect someone.

Then the next generation inherits the consequences.

There isn’t necessarily one monster standing at the center of that.

Sometimes there is simply damage passed from hand to hand until somebody finally asks why they’re still carrying it.

And that, to me, is deeply Gothic.

The Land Remembers Too

The Gothic landscape in The Forgotten Bruja also expands beyond the Espinal house.

Hallowthorn Hill remembers.

The history preserved within the land conflicts with the history recorded by Willowshade.

That distinction matters.

Because archives can be manipulated.

Records can disappear.

Boundaries can be redrawn.

Names can be removed.

Official history can claim something never happened.

But what happens when the land says otherwise?

This connects The Forgotten Bruja to the broader evolution of contemporary Gothic fiction, where haunting can become a way of representing histories that institutions attempted to suppress.

The ghost becomes evidence.

The supernatural becomes testimony.

The haunting says:

You can erase the record.

You cannot erase what happened.

Maybe That’s Why Gothic Keeps Surviving

Gothic fiction has survived for more than two centuries because humans keep creating things they would rather not confront.

Every generation gets new ghosts.

The eighteenth century had anxieties surrounding religion, aristocracy, inheritance and social order.

The nineteenth century confronted industrialization, scientific advancement, empire, sexuality and rapidly changing ideas about human identity.

American Gothic found terror in the contradictions of the nation’s own history.

Postcolonial and Global Gothic traditions continue interrogating empire, race, displacement, cultural erasure and inherited violence.

And contemporary writers continue finding new rooms inside the old haunted house.

That’s where I see The Forgotten Bruja.

It inherits the bones of Gothic fiction, death, inheritance, isolation, ancestral secrets, forbidden knowledge, supernatural forces, psychological uncertainty and a landscape filled with memory, but places them inside the history of a Dominican family trying to understand what survives when people, cultures and stories are pressured to disappear.

Because sometimes the scariest thing isn’t discovering a ghost.

Sometimes it’s discovering that the ghost has been trying to tell you the truth this whole time.

And nobody wanted you to listen.

Now I didn’t get all of this from my mind. Yes, I took ONE gothic class in my creative writing MFA, but I still needed to research and read from some smarty pants.

References & Further Reading (if you would like)

New York Public Library. “A Brief History of Gothic Horror.” The NYPL traces Gothic horror from Horace Walpole through major developments in the genre and provides an accessible introduction to Gothic literary history.

MasterClass. “Gothic Fiction: Definition, Authors and Books.” Useful as a general overview of common Gothic characteristics including ominous environments, supernatural elements, emotional extremes and existential concerns.

Duke University Libraries. “Gothic Monsters, Vampires, and Ghosts.” A research guide collecting Gothic texts across historical periods and demonstrating the genre’s much broader chronology and scope.

Hogle, Jerrold E., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction. Particularly useful for understanding colonial and postcolonial dimensions of Gothic literature and how the genre has evolved beyond its early British forms.

The Cambridge History of the Gothic. Useful for deeper examination of Gothic literature’s relationships with slavery, race, empire, colonialism and postcolonial literature.

Wester, Maisha L. “The Gothic and the Politics of Race,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Modern Gothic. Examines how racial politics have operated within Gothic traditions and how writers of the Black diaspora have engaged with and revised those traditions.

Edwards, Justin D., and Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos, eds. The Cambridge Companion to World-Gothic Literature. Useful for understanding Gothic as a global literary mode rather than exclusively a British or European tradition.

The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic. Explores Gothic writing through colonial histories, diaspora, identity, racialized power and other global contexts.

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