Haunted houses, bitter revenants and muffled heartbeats under floorboards--the American gothic is a macabre tale based on a true story.

Part memoir and part cultural critique, Darkly explores American culture's inevitable gothicity in the traces left from chattel slavery. The persistence of white supremacy and the ubiquity of Black death feeds a national culture of terror and a perpetual undercurrent of mourning.

If the gothic narrative is metabolized fear, if the goth aesthetic is