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.