Darkly: Black History and America's Gothic Soul

A really interesting look at how Black people and Blackness influence American ideas about the Gothic in lots of different genres, as well as the way that Black artists in particular play with and in Goth and Gothic arts. I wanted some of this to be more in depth than it was--it felt like we got a kind of taste of things but not as much of a dive as I would have wanted personally, and some of the analysis also didn't go as deep as I wanted it to, but I think it's a very good jumping off point, especially as a person who isn't as familiar with the Gothic as other folks might be.

We had a very interesting book club discussion this past week. While I was reading, I was struggling to wrap my head around how we were going to talk about it. Eventually I landed on the thought that a book can be important and worth discussing, but I could still find ways to critique without discrediting. What resulted, was a very good discussion and despite my own thoughts, I wholeheartedly recommend it for any book clubs looking for a discussion.

To start, I would have infinitely preferred this to be an essay collection. There was no coherent cohesive thesis statement, no clear common thread connecting chapter to chapter and we found the structure to be unnecessarily muddled. While Taylor ties together gothic and goth culture somewhat show more effectively, the thread doesn’t appear until three quarters of the way through the book. However, had they been essays, I feel she would have had time to put forth multiple arguments and wrap them up in a more contained manner.

Additionally, it was clear to all of us that we were not the intended audience for the book as we all lacked a significant amount of background knowledge that Taylor presumes we have in order to follow and comprehend her points. While our members of younger generations knew the pop culture references, we lacked knowledge of how society functioned over the decades that older members of book club knew, but they were unaware of most of the pop culture references.

While I recognize the importance of Darkly as a cultural critique, it reads far more like a masters or doctoral thesis, written for readers already intimately familiar with the subject matter. For the average layperson, I don’t know that I would be able to recommend this book in a similar manner to how I could recommend So You Want to Talk About Race and Me and White Supremacy. show less