We live in chaotic times in which many of the structures we once believed to be permanent, in the West at least, such as democracy, social stability, the welfare system, or even the idea of a shared reality, appear increasingly fragile. Political institutions are questioned by the very leaders meant to protect them, and we drift without direction amid social crisis, pandemics, and the climate crisis. Meaning itself feels difficult to grasp or hold on to. Nature revolts, societies fracture, and it often seems impossible to understand where, how, or why we are moving forward. In such moments of uncertainty, literature often turns towards darker forms of storytelling, not only to reflect what is happening, but also to find a way to fight against those who keep denying that things are not working as promised. It may seem intuitive that dystopian fiction would dominate the literary landscape in times like these, and indeed, dystopian elements appear across contemporary literature. Yet the most fertile tradition has been the Gothic, especially the gothic fiction dominated by women, LGBTQ+ and migrant and post-colonial authors. Personally, I love it.
The Gothic has always flourished in periods of anxiety. Since its emergence in the late eighteenth century, the genre has functioned as a cultural barometer, translating social fears into haunted houses, monsters, ghosts and uncanny landscapes. Today, however, the Gothic is experiencing a particularly striking revival. Across literary and genre fiction, the aesthetics of the uncanny, the monstrous, and the haunted have returned with renewed force, including an assortment of pop-nonfiction publishing such as Writing the Uncanny by Dan Coxon & Richard V. Hirst, or It Came From the Closet by Joe Vallese; books I recommend for anyone interested in the topic and writing in particular.
Monster met schaal (monster with shell), Johannes Josephus Aarts, 1881 - 1934
Recent years have seen a remarkable surge of Gothic and ‘weird’ fiction, particularly by women. Novels such as The Lamb by Lucy Rose and The Wax Child by Olga Ravn have attracted large audiences while exploring themes of bodily transformation, historical violence and female rage. We have begun to speak of a new wave of ‘weird women’ writers whose work blends horror, folklore and psychological unease. By ‘weird women fiction’, I mean contemporary literature written by women and othernon-hegemonic authors that uses elements of the uncanny, grotesque, and surreal in order to explore female experience, particularly the body, violence, desire and social constraint. However, differing from traditional horror or gothic tales, the point is not just to frighten the readers, but to destabilise reality and expose hidden structures of power. What distinguishes this revival from earlier Gothic traditions is not simply the presence of horror, but the perspective from which such horror is explored. Female characters are no longer victims or passive witnesses of terror. Instead, they often occupy positions of agency within these narratives. They eat, destroy, resist, and sometimes become monstrous themselves. In doing so, the Gothic becomes a space in which anger, disillusionment and resistance can be expressed with a freedom rarely allowed in more realistic modes of fiction. This is visible in The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim and Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito.
While this resurgence is global, one of its most compelling developments, in my opinion, is the mapping out of what is happening in the Anglophone world, which is occurring in Spanish and Latin American literature. In recent years, a powerful strain of rural and rainforest Gothic has emerged across these regions, blending traditional Gothic tropes with elements of magical realism and local folklore. These works are increasingly being translated into English and attracting international attention.
Novels such as Woodworm by Layla Martínez, El cielo de la selva by Eleine Villar Madruga (soon to be translated into English), Un amor by Sara Mesa, and Pequeñas mujeres rojas by Marta Sanz exemplify this trend. Here, isolated villages, forests and forgotten landscapes replace the castles and abbeys of classic Gothic fiction. The supernatural frequently merges with the historical: buried crimes, political violence and family secrets return to haunt the present. This particular Gothic draws on the histories of Spain and Latin America, where unresolved political trauma continues to shape contemporary society. Dictatorships, civil conflicts and colonial legacies have left silences that literature has increasingly begun to confront more openly. The Gothic proves especially well-suited to this task. Ghosts, curses and uncanny presences become metaphors for histories that refuse to remain buried.
In this sense, the Gothic allows authors to explore tensions between class, gender and state violence from the relative distance of fiction. It gives narrative form to the lingering presence of past atrocities, transforming historical silence into haunting. The genre thrives on what has been repressed.
This connection between the Gothic and history is not new. Authors such as Shirley Jackson and Joyce Carol Oates had already revitalised the genre in the twentieth century through forms of American Gothic, using decaying houses and fractured families to examine social violence and moral collapse. The contemporary revival further expands these concerns, incorporating new anxieties that feel particularly urgent in the twenty-first century.
One of the most striking developments is the emergence of the eco-Gothic. As the climate crisis becomes increasingly visible, nature itself has begun to occupy a central place in horror narratives. In many contemporary works, the environment is no longer a passive backdrop, but an active and often hostile presence. In novels such as Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia or Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval, organic matter (mould, spores, fungi) takes on an unsettling agency. The body becomes porous, vulnerable to contamination by the natural world. This fascination with fungal or spore-based horror reflects a broader cultural unease about ecological instability and the fragile boundaries between human life and the environment. Eco-Gothic expands the traditional haunted house into something far larger. The Gothic is no longer confined to castles, corridors or family estates. Entire landscapes become haunted. Forests behave strangely, animals act unpredictably, and the planet itself begins to feel alien.
In this sense, the Gothic continues to perform the cultural function it has always served: transforming conceptual anxieties into narrative form. When reality becomes difficult to interpret, horror provides a symbolic language through which those fears can be expressed.
Other: the foreigner, the madwoman, the monster lurking beyond the boundaries of respectable society. Today, many authors invert this dynamic. Women, queer characters, trans people and children increasingly occupy the centre of Gothic narratives as heroes or antiheroes in their own right. The establishment, the institutions that claim authority and order, often become the true source of horror, or that against which we need to seek vengeance. The uncanny emerges not from the margins of society, but from its supposedly stable core. This inversion is particularly evident in works such as Layla Martínez’s Woodworm, where revenge becomes a powerful narrative force. The Gothic allows characters who have historically been silenced to confront oppressive structures directly. Violence, transformation and monstrosity become tools through which suppressed anger can finally find expression.
Similarly, Carmen María Machado’s short fiction collection Her Body and Other Parties demonstrates how the Gothic can challenge dominant cultural narratives. Her stories combine body horror, folklore and surrealism to explore themes of gender, trauma and power. In Machado’s work, the monstrous is politically charged since it allows a space for the female body to exist, outside patriarchal spectations, capitalist limits and sexual impositions.
What emerges from these diverse strands is a genre that remains remarkably adaptable and crucial. The Gothic has always functioned as a mirror for the fears of its time. In the eighteenth century, it reflected anxieties about rationality and the supernatural. In the nineteenth century, it explored industrial modernity and colonial expansion.In the twentieth century, it absorbed psychological horror and social decay. Today’s Gothic addresses a different constellation of fears: climate collapse, political instability, patriarchy, capitalism, historical trauma and the fragility of social institutions. Yet the mechanism remains the same. The genre transforms abstract anxieties into concrete forms: ghosts, fungi, haunted forests, vengeful women, allowing readers to confront the unsettling realities of the present through the mediated space of fiction.
For this reason, the resurgence of Gothic literature should not be surprising. When the world itself begins to feel uncanny, the Gothic becomes one of the most effective literary tools for making sense of that unease. If anything, its revival suggests that the genre never truly disappeared. It simply waits, returning whenever reality becomes strange enough to demand ghosts. Beware of what lingers in the dark, because we created it.