Kemp, J. (2001) a glossary of Literary Gothic Terms. Web

Gothic elements include the following:

Gothic literature (also ‘Gothic fiction’ or ‘Gothic horror’) is one of the oldest and widely studied literary genres. It encompasses novels and stories having Gothic elements such as horror, mystery, adventure, psychological torment and supernatural phenomenon. The dark atmosphere, haunted houses full of passage ways, shadowy corridors, hidden rooms and underground tunnels, the windswept moors, and the gloomy and uncertain landscapes or architecture that create an atmosphere of suspense and mystery—all are the characteristic elements of Gothicism in literature. 
Gothicism actually emerged in 18th century Europe as the sub-genre of the Romantic movement. It placed great emphasis on intense emotion and blending old with new, terror with pleasure, and death with romance. This unique pairing helped create a sense of eeriness and estrangement that Gothic fiction is specifically known for. The works of Gothic fiction also intertwined the past and the present. For instance, even though man’s progress seemed to make him increasingly powerful, history continued to haunt him.
The Gothic novelists, under the spell of medievalism, wrote novels of terror, suspense, and psychological thrill. The origin of Gothic novels is ascribed to Horace Walpole who wrote the first Gothic novel “The Castle of Otranto” in 1764. This first Gothic novel skillfully combined the elements of Romanticism with horror and the supernatural. Walpole’s novel inspired a number of writers who introduced the same mechanism of ‘terror’ in their writings and earned great popularity. Among them the most famous were Edgar Allan Poe, Mathew Lewis, Mary Shelley, Ann Radcliffe, Bram Stoker and others. 

The Gothic Revival continues! And this year, Southern Gothic joins the fold in our roundup of the most haunted, atmospheric stories of 2022. Here’s a quick definition of what Gothic fiction does, courtesy of Faye Snowden’s wonderful article: “Through stories of transgression and depictions of the grotesque, [Gothic fiction] evokes anxiety in the reader, leaving them to question society’s institutions, religions, politics, familial and other relationships…” While European Gothic novels mostly featured women in distress in dilapidated houses, Snowden distinguishes two particularly American evolutions to Gothic fiction once it crosses the pond in the 19th century:
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“The first is the return of ideas, brutal realities, and anxieties that have been repressed, especially those related to the dichotomies on which the country was founded (e.g. freedom in the midst of slavery). This return of the repressed usually calls into question the notion of the American Dream, and wreaks havoc on the present. The second is race, or fear of the other, which becomes even more pronounced in the Southern Gothic narrative.”
I see these markers in every one of the books below, including two that feature Gothic in a Latin American historical context. Only a surface reading could dub these novels “escapist;” to read them closely is to remember the bloody building blocks of our historically haunted society.