Leila Taylor takes us into the dark heart of the American gothic, analysing the ways it relates to race in America in the twenty-first century.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: Blackness and America's Gothic Soulexplores 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 romanticized melancholy, what does that look and sound like in Black America?"I am struck by the depth of Leila Taylor's vision. The generosity shownin the way a history (and present) is illuminated. This book does somuch beautiful work to widen the expectations and understandings of