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Characters in Gothic stories are like figures in our dreams; they embody and act out conflicting, subconscious psychic energies.

—The Return of the Repressed

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A ‘national brand’ of Gothic fiction seems to proliferate whenever the political and economic dominance that a given country has acquired appears to be passing its peak and about to decline (...). Although writers have been producing Gothic fiction fairly continuously for the last two centuries, the readership for Gothic horror has expanded significantly in such crisis periods, when the public mood becomes uneasy and pessimistic, and when re-evaluation of the national identity seems to take on a particular urgency.

—The Return of the Repressed

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Citing various critics, Gilda Williams catalogues several aesthetic qualities that are particularly prominent in the visual Gothic, including ‘fragmentation, subverted notions of beauty, dramatic lighting’ as well as its recurring ‘visual triggers’, like ‘the emphasis on surface and texture’, ‘the literalization of idea into form’, ‘claustrophobic space and disintegration, signalling a history of unhappy relations with the past’, and ‘the voyeuristic and theatrical framing of a scene often belonging to a specifically female position as an outsider’.

—Gothic Remixed

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As has been well documented by Kari Winter, H.L. Malchow and myself, the Anglo-American Gothic tradition emerged simultaneous to and in dialogue with slavery.

—‘To Thrill the Land with Horror’

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Where satire demolishes, camp rehabilitates.

—Gothic Remixed

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C.G. Jung says of individual regression that ‘[what it] brings to the surface certainly seems at first sight to be slime from the depths; but… this “slime” contains not merely incompatible and rejected remnants of everyday life, or inconvenient and objectionable animal tendencies, but also germs of new life and vital possibilities for the future.’

—The Return of the Repressed

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The Victorian Gothic tradition (...) establishes a layered narrative structure in which a story must be peeled back to reveal the secret or repressed centre.

—Skin Shows

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The threat posed by the Gothic monster is a combination of money, science, perversion, and imperialism.

—Skin Shows

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These novels not only tend to emphasize the destructive potential of uncontrolled masculine aggression and repressed feminine energy, they also challenge their societies’ privileging of ‘masculine’ values, such as purposiveness, activity, and reason, over ‘feminine’ values, such as relatedness, receptivity, and feeling.

—The Return of the Repressed

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Jung argues that ‘[w]hatever we persistently exclude from conscious training and adaptation necessarily remains in an untrained, undeveloped, infantile, archaic condition.’

—The Return of the Repressed

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The controlling theme of this fiction: the danger of compartmentalization.

—The Return of the Repressed

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Contributor Applications are Open

All applications will close the afternoon of June 9, 2025.

You can check out the full application guidelines here.

Writing/Art Application

Cover/Merch Art Application

This is a charity-zine about the show Severance; all profits will be donated to the labor rights charity A Better Balance.

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The uncanny confronts the subject with something long repressed or forgotten.

—Gothic & Gender

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In our great cities, placards announce lectures which will tell us how to get into touch with the souls of the departed; and it cannot be denied that many of the most able and penetrating minds among our scientific men have come to the conclusion, especially towards the close of their lives, that a contact of this kind is not utterly impossible.

—The Uncanny

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Black Gothic (…) reveals the archetypal depictions of racial, sexual, and gendered others as constructions useful in the production of white patriarchal dominance.

—African American Gothic

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A simultaneous attraction and repulsion to what is both familiar and unfamiliar.

—Gothic Contemporaries

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Memory and personal identity are somehow entwined.

—The Gothic and the Art of Memory