HeyJaredReflections on Gothic Fiction
Gothic fiction has always known that the dark is where the truth lives. Reflections on Gothic Fiction is a podcast for readers, writers, and anyone who has ever felt more at home in a crumbling mansion than a drawing room.
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 6
- Latest publication
- Sep 22, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 13, 2026
Latest episodes
Episode 17: What Else Is True? How Gothic Fiction Teaches Us to Think (opens the original)
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Gothic fiction is for thinkers. It asks us to question what we can see, what we are being told, and why we accepted the story in the first place. In this episode, I explore how my understanding of the Gothic has moved beyond the idea of a cultural X-ray. From family myths and government propaganda to the questions within my own novels, Gothic fiction pushes us to look at what is ugly and uncomfortable, acknowledge what has been hidden, and keep asking: What else is true?
Episode 16: Gothic and the Illusion of Freedom (opens the original)
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What if freedom is an illusion, and every escape simply exchanges one set of constraints for another? We imagine freedom as life without barriers: enough money to go anywhere, enough courage to leave everything behind, or an open wilderness where no one can tell us what to do. But does that kind of freedom actually exist? Beginning with a lottery billboard I passed on my way to cancer surgery, this episode explores the difference between freedom and agency, and the possibility that what we call
Episode 15: The Attic, the Asylum, and the Gothic Woman (opens the original)
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What happens when the people with power over your life decide your emotions can't be trusted? In Episode 12, I'm talking about the madwoman as a real historical terror, not a Gothic cliche. Women really were institutionalized for hysteria, for refusing husbands, for inheriting money, or for grieving too loudly. The law made it easy, and the asylum became the enforcement mechanism. I walk through how this fear evolved from 18th-century towers to 19th-century attics, from Bedlam's iron bars to Cha
Episode 14: Tech Gothic — AI, Algorithms, and the New Haunted World (opens the original)
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Tech Gothic: AI, Algorithms, and the New Haunted World What if artificial intelligence isn't just a technology story, but a Gothic one? In this episode, I'm exploring how the oldest fears in Gothic fiction have quietly migrated into our modern world. The castle became the data centre. The ghost became data. The doppelgänger became digital. We'll start with Frankenstein, but differently. Rather than a failed experiment, we look at it as a successful story whose consequences its creator never unde
Episode 13: The Hidden Language of Flowers in the Attic Symbols, Motifs and Gothic Meaning (opens the original)
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Part two of our deep dive into Flowers in the Attic, and this time we're going beneath the story to the symbolic world underneath it. Because V. C. Andrews wasn't just writing about four children locked away by their grandmother. She was building a novel where almost nothing is accidental — where paper flowers stand in for the childhood the kids can no longer have, where a beautiful house hides something that's quietly died beneath its surface, and where an attic becomes both a prison and a sanc
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