For a few years now, there's been this meme of putting together "_____ Gothic" lists, full of eerie narrative snippets. Like, Pacific Northwest Gothic with descriptions of timeless, perpetual rain and so on.

And while the spooky narrative flourishes are fun, that meme bugs me.

Southern Gothic as a genre isn't just a collection of eerie, startling imagery. It uses the macabre and darkly ironic to engage with terrible, unresolved histories: the cultural void of a broken Confederacy, the legacy of slavery during Reconstruction, the crumbling plantation.

There can be no Pacific Northwest Gothic that doesn't engage the legacy of immigrant blood spilled to bring the railroads over the Rockies, the Chinese Exclusion Acts, the destitution and ghost towns left in the wake of gold rush booms, Oregon's legacy of "white state" policies.

The difference between Unsettling Creepypasta and an actual Gothic subgenre grounded in place (or moment) is a critical lens on the unresolved cultural traumas of that place. That's where the strange, macabre, and supernatural stems from: history attempting to resolve itself.

Anyway, I saw a Zoom Gothic post today. And while it was cute, there was no mention of our current pandemic; rising death tolls as a result of slashed medical systems; surveillance culture; xenophobia; the cult of productivity eroding our identities; or vitally, neoliberalism.

I know it's just a joke format. But it completely misses what makes American Gothic and Southern Gothic powerful!

If Zoom Gothic were a genre -- why not? -- it would engage Thatcherism and Reaganism. Neoliberalism gutted our infrastructure, to the point where we're relying on a teleconferencing startup to live; at the same time, we're being asked for unparalleled trust in government decrees.

Huge thanks to @videodante for this context. (And to be clear, I wasn't intending to pick on this post or any other specific post - just the thing that the meme format became over time.) https://twitter.com/videodante/status/1247189144956104705?s=19

The gothic where I live:

In the 1960s, they flooded this valley to build dams to send electricity to America. Several towns have been rebuilt overlooking the flooded foundations of their own homes.

The local indigenous people have been declared extinct. They're still here.

For generations, pacifists have ended up here - the Doukhobors, exiled from Russia; back-to-the-land hippies, starting communes; draft dodgers, escaping the Vietnam War. We're a few hours north of some of the most fortified evangelical white-supremacist strongholds in the world.

Everything closes at six, except for the picturesque cafe run by the fundamentalist cult. It's open all night long.

Every time a mill closes, there's a ten year period where we wonder: will this little village become a wealthy tourist hotspot or a ghost town? It's even odds.

If there were to be a West Kootenay Gothic, those are the true details of the place that would give rise to the supernatural and macabre flourishes.