By Kimberly Jackson
There is a shadow of darkness, a looming presence that nips at the neck of progress and laughs at hope. Our terror, our fright, lives with us—or do we live with it? This is a question that sits at the very center of the Ethno-Gothic, a genre where the past refuses to stay buried, and where horror is not a visitor but a long-time resident of the American BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) experience. In these narratives, the supernatural is not an escape from reality—it is the language reality uses to speak truths that are often too heavy for daylight and casual conversations; the speculative is used to highlight social injustice.
The traditional European Gothic fiction has all its eerie and otherworldly tropes, such as distant castles, ghosts who rattle chains, monsters who lurk behind thick velvet curtains, and ancient family curses whose secrets are dramatically imagined. The phantoms of the Ethno-Gothic are historical; the dread inherited, the terror domestic. It sits at the kitchen table and follows you on the walk home.
Few works embody this haunting narrative better than Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), where the spirit of a murdered child returns as a poltergeist, not only to frighten but to force her mother, Sethe, into remembrance. The haunting is not an intrusion, it is a reckoning, a painful reminder of the trauma of slavery and its afterlife effects on Black bodies and their restless spirits. Morrison’s ghost is an archive, a testament to the psychic wounds left by the traumatic spaces of slavery. In Morrison’s world, every floorboard is a whisper and every shadow is a memory. The supernatural is simply the past insisting on its right to be acknowledged. The Gothic, in her hands, becomes a spiritual excavation.
Octavia Butler, whom I became familiar with by reading Parable of the Sower (1993) (one of the most terrifying books I’ve ever read), continues this excavation in her 1979 novel, Kindred, where time travel is not a fantasy but a chain linking present and past. Dana’s involuntary journeys to a Maryland plantation reveal a truth the Ethno-Gothic never lets us forget: history is not behind us, it is beneath us. It rises through the cracks at the least expected times. Butler does not conjure monsters, she reveals societal structures monstrous enough on their own. In Kindred, horror is the realization that survival demands proximity to brutality, even across centuries.
But the Ethno-Gothic also reshapes and reclaims the traditional horror canon. Victor LaValle’s The Ballad of Black Tom (2016) transforms Lovecraft’s cosmic dread into something more grounded, more cutting. In LaValle’s Harlem, the eldritch horrors beyond the veil are no more terrifying than the men with badges and billy clubs patrolling the streets. Racism becomes the first and most recognizable monster. In his 2017 graphic novel, Destroyer, LaValle uses the story of Frankenstein to dissect the grief of a Black mother whose child is stolen by police violence. The Gothic reanimates, but LaValle’s story asks, At what point does grief become powerful enough to revive itself?
The Ethno-Gothic extends its reach through pop culture as well. Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country (2016) and the television adaptation confront the grotesqueries of Jim Crow America with a blend of pulp adventure and cosmic horror. Their message is unmistakable; when the world itself is structured to deny your humanity, the supernatural feels almost merciful. The monsters from other dimensions may be terrifying, but at least they follow their own logic. Human cruelty—particularly racism—has never needed such consistency.
Tananarive Due, a scholar and architect of modern Black horror, often speaks of “the horror of history.” Her fiction treats terror as a legacy—an inheritance that is both a burden and a map. In Due’s worlds, ancestral memory is a force that can wound or empower, depending on how it is confronted. She reminds us that for African Americans, survival is not just resistance, it is a supernatural act.
This is the essence of the Ethno-Gothic; it is not about what lurks in the dark, but about what history has already illuminated. It is not about curses cast by witches, but the ones encoded in laws and social structures. The American Gothic—its plantations, its slave quarters, its sundown towns—needs no embellishment to be terrifying. It was already a house built on bones.
Where European Gothic fiction asks, “What if the dead return?,” the Ethno-Gothic asks, “How could they not?” After centuries of suffering, loss, and erasure, the dead have every reason to speak. And the living, shaped by generational echoes, cannot help but hear them.
Ethno-Gothic storytelling does not aim to frighten in the traditional sense. Its purpose is more sacred, more transformative. It bears witness. It uncovers the terrors that polite society hides beneath patriotism and nostalgia. It insists that horror is not only a genre but a historical fact, and that by acknowledging it, we reclaim power that was once stripped away.
Our terror, our fright, our shadows—these are not invaders in African American life. They are reminders. They are warnings. They are guides. And through the Ethno-Gothic, they become stories that mourn, stories that challenge, stories that rise from the past, not to curse the living, but to ensure they are never forgotten.
Recommended Readings
- Anderson R., Fluker C. (2019). The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Black Futurity, Art+Design. Eds. Lexington Books.
- Brooks, L., Anderson, R., Taylor, D., Baham, N. (2019). When is Wakanda: Afrofuturism and Dark Speculative Futurity. Eds. Journal of Futures Studies, vol 24 (2)
- Van Veen T. & Anderson. R. (2018). Eds. Future Movements: Black Lives, Black Politics, and Black Futures TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 39.
- Anderson R., Jennings J. (2018). Cosmic Underground: A Grimoire of Black Speculative Discontent. Eds. Cedar Grove.
- Anderson R., Jones, C. (2015). Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness. Eds. Lexington Book
