I can’t remember the very first time I encountered Gothic literature. For me, it was more a case of growing awareness, of tales about youths suffering the tyranny of the adults in whose institutional care they happened to be. And the medium that brought those tales home initially was television. As a child of the brightly lit twentieth century, I wondered where they all hailed from, these young people trapped in gloomy old houses and lost in rain-soaked landscapes, searching for a route to self-actualisation? I was in adolescence before I engaged with the literature that made these television epics possible.

I was fourteen when I found a copy of Jane Eyre in the school library on a Friday afternoon. I took it home and spent the entire evening reading the book. The next day, I resumed reading and stayed in my room until I finished, and then I sat for ages, wondering. Only a strict directive from my parents to join the family for Saturday evening tea brought me downstairs. But descend the staircase I did, declaring triumphantly, “It’s fine, I’ve read Jane Eyre.” A year or so later, I read Wuthering Heights by another Brontë sister. From then onward, I couldn’t find sagas enough of brooding heroes in old houses, and heroines trying to unravel family secrets.

Over the following years, I read voraciously, the remaining Brontë books, Sir Walter Scott, Dickens and Hardy. I didn’t bypass Jane Austen, and I laughed uproariously at her burlesque of the Gothic voiced in Northanger Abbey. And yes, I confess to bearing strands of protagonist Catherine Morland. I moved on to twentieth-century literature, Daphne Du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King and Dean Koontz. But the voices of the older heroes and heroines still spoke to me: it was as if they wanted me to create something.

Following completion of my Masters in English literature, I embarked on another voyage. Beginning with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, I traced the progress of Gothic tropes through the eighteenth century to the present day. This voyage led to the writing and publication of my book, Wicked Uncles and Haunted Cellars: What the Gothic Heroine Tells Us Today (Greenwich Exchange).

In it, I discuss the endurance of the Gothic, and its continuing relevance in this technological environment. I explore how bright lights and smartphones will never vanquish the ghosts that preside within, and sometimes outside, ourselves. I refer to the nascent adolescent within all of us, and how we struggle constantly to cast off the bindings of banality and mediocrity that are even more of a threat to the personality than the monsters that lurk in the basement. Of course, I now write my own Gothic tales, but that is a story for another time.

I didn’t stumble upon the Gothic. I was raised by it.

I lived with the uncanny long before I read Dracula or wandered the echoing halls of theory. Cosied up on the couch as a child of the late 80s and early 90s, I was mesmerised by the soft horrors of The Addams Family, The Munsters and I Dream of Jeannie. Some might call them monster-coms or paranormal sitcoms, but to me, they were family albums.

It wasn’t the fright that drew me in. It was the familiarity.

The Gothic has always felt like home, even in its laugh-track form: a space where strangeness was ordinary, where death wasn’t feared but invited to dinner, where affect ran thick and weirdness was not a flaw but a form of love. The Addamses weren’t monstrous to me – they were kind, devoted, delightfully odd. In a world that often punished difference, they celebrated it with joy. And in that celebration, I felt recognised.

No one told me this was the Gothic. I had to grow into the word, but the sensibility was always already in me: the hauntings, the yearning, the sense that beauty could be twisted and the twisted, beautiful. As I aged, the shadows deepened. I began to trace the aesthetic’s darker roots – abandonment, loss, power. I started to notice what lay beneath the surface of the laughter: the way these shows carved out space for otherness, for melancholy, for critique.

Looking back, those early monster-coms were my first lessons in Radical Gothic Relationality – long before I gave my theory a name. They modelled relationality in resistance, where love took strange forms and community wasn’t built through sameness but through acceptance of the spectral, the grotesque, the uncontainable.

For me, the Gothic has never been about fear alone. It has always been about recognition – of the parts of ourselves that don’t quite fit the frame, of the ghosts that trail behind us, of the systems that haunt our lives in ways we are taught not to name. The Gothic taught me not just how to see the world, but how to feel it differently.

I still carry those first hauntings with me as a cultural philosopher and theorist. They echo in every footnote, flicker through every lecture, and linger in the questions I ask about power, affect and recognition. That old black-and-white screen glowed with more than nostalgia – it gave me my first glimpse into the uncanny kinship of a world that felt, finally, like it had room for me.

The Gothic didn’t frighten me. It found me.

And I’ve never left.