BIPOC WOMEN ARE BRINGING THEIR OWN GHOSTS TO GOTHIC FICTION
Gothic fiction has always had a type.
For a genre so obsessed with class, sexuality, humanity versus unnatural forces, and people trapped in oppressive, inescapable landscapes, it has historically shown a lot of love to arguably the least oppressed among us: the straight, white, old-money, mega wealthy.
But that centuries-old tradition was overdue for some new blood.
The 2020s have largely delivered, with a boom of not just BIPOC voices, but BIPOC women taking all those familiar Gothic obsessions—monsterhood, otherhood, haunted places—and seeing what they look like through their eyes. And some of the most interesting Gothic fiction being written right now is coming from women of color who clearly love the genre enough to mess with it.
Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
Personally, I blame Crimson Peak for getting me into all of this.
Guillermo del Toro’s 2015 Gothic romance is brimming with sexual passion, dark secrets, ghosts, and all the mutton-sleeve dresses a girl could want. Swoon. There are monsters, supernatural and human, yet somehow the gigantic emotions are still the most terrifying thing onscreen. Everything feels so operatic. Love is all consuming. Grief is practically sentient. Desire has consequences. And from frame one, the film is blinking a giant neon sign that says grounded realism has no place in this (haunted) house.
I was so in.
My post-Crimson Peak self started working backward, finding Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and eventually taking what I can only describe as a shallow but enthusiastic dive into Gothic fiction as a whole: where it came from, how it evolved, what it kept, what it left behind, and why centuries later we’re still so drawn to these strange apparitions and questionable wallpaper.
The first work of Gothic fiction is generally believed to be Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Published in 1764, the story of medieval dynastic and sexual politics opens with a prince being crushed to death on his wedding day. Walpole wasn't messing around. Like a lot of early Gothic fiction, Otranto is heavy on morality and religion, with ancestral sins and temptation never too far behind.
Then, in 1818, 20-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley published Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and gave the Gothic monster an existential crisis. Frankenstein’s creature isn’t some unknowable evil arriving from elsewhere; he’s the product of human ambition and some deeply irresponsible decision-making. Victor creates life, takes one look at it, decides absolutely not, and abandons the whole situation. The monster as an embodiment of something deeply human would follow Gothic fiction straight into its Victorian revival.
The Victorian era was particularly good for people who liked their entertainment lurid. Penny dreadfuls made cheap serialized fiction widely available, serving up crime, murder, melodrama, and supernatural horror to a very willing public. Varney the Vampire, published in the 1840s, helped cement many of the vampire conventions we still recognize today—including one very important contribution: fangs.
You’re welcome, Twilight.
By the second half of the 19th century, Gothic fiction was having a full-blown identity crisis. The Woman in White (1859), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Dracula (1897) were all preoccupied with duality and duplicity: respectability versus desire, the face you show society versus the person lurking underneath, the human versus the monstrous.
The genre didn’t need to stay trapped in some windswept European castle either. Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) brought Gothic terror into a more recognizable home, albeit one with architecture seemingly designed by someone with a personal grudge. Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby moved the horror into a New York apartment building in 1967 and proved that your neighbors can, in fact, be worse than ghosts.
The setting changed. The century changed. The furniture got significantly less ornate. The Gothic kept its favorite things.
There’s usually a haunted place at the center of it, even if the thing doing the haunting isn’t a ghost. Strange happenings, visions, dreams, or coincidences that feel a little too pointed to be coincidences. The past refusing to stay politely in the past. Emotions so heightened they practically become part of the weather. And very often, a young woman who finds herself at the center of something nobody can—or will—properly explain to her.
At its root, Gothic fiction speaks to our fear and fascination with the unknown. And like any genre that manages to survive a few hundred years, it knows how to adapt.
So it’s hardly surprising that BIPOC writers have embraced the Gothic too. And though early on those stories often came in forms less immediately recognizable than your typical pale woman in a nightgown fleeing monsters through a manor, (Beloved by Toni Morrison, Linden Hills by Gloria Naylor) we’re now seeing a return to form. Only now the woman in question is far less vulnerable, far from a damsel, and considerably less pale.
Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
If we’re talking modern, 2020s Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic (2020) has to be in the room. The novel gives the genre of women-running-from-houses a triumphant spin. All the classic beats are here: a young heroine summoned to a creepy house, an aristocratic family with very weird vibes, a relative everyone thinks might be losing her mind, and various eerie goings-on that may or may not be psychological.
But Moreno-Garcia doesn’t just blow the dust off old conventions. She expertly crafts every genre element she touches, using those old Gothic standards to explore the social tensions running through the story’s setting. Ghosts as metaphors for sin or the unknown become manifestations of the past intruding on the present, bringing race, class, colonialism, and all the things people would very much prefer to keep buried along with them.
Like Moreno-Garcia, Isabel Cañas makes her own connections between past and present.
Set just after the Mexican War for Independence, The Hacienda follows a young woman who marries for security only to find her new estate may be haunted. A sexy local priest who moonlights as a witch is her best hope of survival. It’s lush, beautiful, deeply creepy, and completely deserving of the Rebecca comparisons it often receives.
The Hacienda was only the beginning. Vampires of El Norte (2023) mixes vampires and romance with the U.S.-Mexico War, while The Possession of Alba Díaz (2026) takes demonic possession into a Mexican silver mine. And just recently she released The House of Gardenias (2026), a YA Gothic set against revolution and class inequality. At this point, Cañas isn’t borrowing from the Gothic tradition so much as having an ongoing conversation with it.
Some of the most interesting modern Gothic has stopped bothering with the manor house altogether.
Tamika Thompson’s The Curse of Hester Gardens (2026) might be one of the clearest examples. Its haunted place is a public-housing project in Michigan, where Nona is raising her two surviving sons after losing her oldest at eighteen. One is a valedictorian headed for an Ivy League school. The other is getting pulled in a direction she knows can end badly. Nona is already doing everything she can to keep both of them alive when footsteps start sounding through empty rooms, residents begin having strange encounters, and her college-bound son suddenly starts acting like someone else entirely.
Thompson isn’t alone in taking the Gothic somewhere less expected. Nicola Yoon’s One of Our Kind (2024) puts something deeply wrong beneath the manicured perfection of a wealthy all-Black gated community, while Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory (2023) makes a segregated reform school in Jim Crow Florida its haunted ground, where a twelve-year-old boy can see the ghosts of children who died there and the living are considerably more frightening.
Other books leave the neighborhood behind too. Yah Yah Scholfield’s (a non-binary author and therefore not a woman, but mentioning because, well, this my piece) On Sundays She Picked Flowers (2026) heads into the forests of southern Georgia, where a woman fleeing an abusive home finds refuge among ghosts, haints, and land with its own bloody history.
And Rivers Solomon (another non-binary author) takes Sorrowland (2021) even further into the wilderness. A pregnant woman escapes a religious compound, gives birth to twins alone in the woods, and soon realizes that leaving one nightmare behind doesn’t mean it’s finished with her. What follows gets stranger, angrier, and much harder to categorize.
If you go on to read one book from this piece, read Sorrowland.
Because so many Gothic classics revolve around women with very little control over their own lives, contemporary Gothic has also become a very good place to get weird about womanhood.
Christina Li’s The Manor of Dreams (2025) stretches that conversation across three generations of Chinese American women. At its center is a trailblazing Hollywood actress whose fame and wealth do little to protect her from racism, an abusive marriage, or an industry with very specific ideas about what kind of woman gets to be a star. Years later, her death sends two families back into her crumbling California estate, where decades of ambition, sacrifice, resentment, and very angry ghosts are waiting for them.
Motherhood, monstrosity, and domestic violence all collide in Sunyi Dean’s The Book Eaters (2022). Devon is a survivor of abuse and a “book eater,” a creature who literally consumes books for sustenance. She’s raised on a steady diet of fairy tales and romantic notions about what her life is supposed to look like, then grows up and starts realizing the stories she’s been fed might have been bullshit.
Roshani Chokshi is similarly suspicious of fairy tales in The Last Tale of the Flower Bride (2023), though she’s considerably more interested in seducing you with them first.
The novel follows a scholar known only as the Bridegroom and his mysterious, fabulously wealthy wife, who makes him promise never to dig into her past. Naturally, they soon end up back at her childhood home, where all those secrets are waiting.
This was my first Chokshi novel, and damn, girl can tell a story. The entire thing exists just slightly outside recognizable reality, full of myths, fairy tales, games, and fantasies that slowly start losing their grip on the truth. More than a send-up of classic Gothic stories, Flower Bride is an ode to fairy tales, the Grimm kind, in all their dark and beautiful forms. Girls are mistreated, promised happily ever afters, and rarely given much warning about what those endings cost. By the time Chokshi is done pulling apart all that fantasy, the book feels like waking up from a fever dream I would’ve happily, voluntarily remained trapped in.
To love anything that much was dangerous,
As the Gothic keeps evolving, I hope we keep getting stories that push the genre somewhere new without losing the things that made us love it in the first place. There’s something satisfying about watching writers take something so familiar and make it answer to a completely different set of experiences.
After all, we are living in a time when women regularly face down horrors and ghosts of our own. This new era of Gothic lit might just be the salve we need to help us see a path forward.
Where there is darkness, there is also…the blood of our enemies.
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