Darkly: Black History and America's Gothic Soul by Brooklyn-based writer, lecturer, and designer Leila Taylor

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 reveals the heart of America’s darkness in the specters left from chattel slavery and the persistence of white supremacy. Locating the gothic in technologies of terror, the insurgency of melancholy, and the guilty conscience of a country that got away with murder, Darkly shows how this trauma has been metabolized into art, music, film, and literature.America’s story is founded in horror, with a culture shaped from the Black experience, proving that you can’t get more goth than Black.

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From the Author

Darkly is an immersive look into aspects of history and pop culture that has given the terms goth and gothic context. Taylor asserts that foundations and general understandings of goth are intertwined with the Black American experience. There is nothing goth that isn't Black; both literally and figuratively. Darkly digs even deeper with AfroGoth. An "African American gothness," or, we both prefer the term, Black, is a concept that looks at atrocities suffered and memorialization that becomes manifest in introspection, art, and style.

Continue reading the book review, DARKLY: At The Heart Of Goth, Is Blackness on Graveyard Shift Sisters. Darkly is available for purchase from Repeater Books, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Goodreads.

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