Anyone who has seen a horror film or read a Stephen King novel is familiar with gothic tropes: dark villains who never tire of chasing hapless maidens; supernatural monsters; heroes who are sometimes weak; twisted, yet uncannily familiar, landscapes; the list goes on. Yet the gothic is more than a long list of tropes deployed to terrify. African American Gothic reveals the myriad ways African American writers manipulate the gothic genre to critique traditional racial ideologies. The book investigates fiction from each major era in African American culture, including Narrative of the Life of...