African American Gothic fills a gap that has been haunting Gothic studies for a while now: the need for a historically broad and theoretically grounded look at how African Americans have used and adapted gothic tropes in their writing. The need for such a book has been growing ever since Teresa Goddu identified race as the main source of ideological contradiction and fissure in American national narratives in her influential Gothic America: Narrative, History and Nation (1997) and has gathered urgency in recent years as scholars have investigated related issues such as postcolonial Gothic, Caribbean ghostwriting, postcolonial ghosts, and the myriad complex ways that race interacts with tropes of spectrality, social death, cultural trauma, historical haunting, monstrosity and Otherness. Marisa Parham's Haunting and Displacement in African-American Literature and Culture (2009) explored the ways in which African American literature remains haunted by the past, and focussed on questions of memory, both personal and collective, but Maisha Wester's study is the first to claim the term African American Gothic – as an analog to sub-genres like the southern Gothic or female Gothic – for a book-length historical investigation of how African American writers have written the Gothic into their work, critiquing and adapting it in the process.

Beginning with Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and a fictionalized slave narrative, Hannah Croft's The Bondswoman's Narrative, Wester looks at how these early African American texts appropriated racialized Gothic tropes in order to redefine and redeploy them as social critique of the institutions and values that colluded with slave-owners. A second chapter examines texts from both antebellum and post-Civil War literature to show how they used the Gothic to reveal that freedom remained an incomplete project late into the nineteenth century. Reading Victor Séjour's “The Mulatto” (1837) together with Charles Chestnut's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and Pauline Hopkin's Of One Blood: The Hidden Self (1903), Wester shows how these texts of rape, incest, and violence, often sexual violence against women, addressed the continuing regime of violence that plagued black life both before and after the Civil War, often ending in ambivalent and problematic ways that reflected the absence of happy endings for many African American lives. A third chapter continues with the theme of progress and its frustrations, looking at texts by Jean Toomer and Ralph Ellison and their shared use of the trope of a Gothic descent underground into darkness. This chapter emphasizes more than any other the extent to which the African American Gothic refuses to choose between binary oppositions, refusing to demonize the South and celebrate the North, for example. These three chapters comprise the first section of the book, titled “Early Expressions of Black Gothic,” followed by a second section also composed of three chapters under the subheading “Black Gothic at Millennium's End.” The first of these looks at three African American women's texts (by Alice Walker, Gayle Jones and Gloria Naylor) to explore the problems of collective racial identity faced by African American women in the post-civil rights era. The main thrust of the chapter is to examine the issue of male violence against women within the African American community, as well as the history of rape and sexual exploitation of black women under slavery. The fifth chapter of the book, and second of the three last chapters comprising the second half, is exclusively focussed on Beloved and its investigation of how slavery continues to haunt and damage the African American family, long after Emancipation. This chapter continues the focus on destructive patriarchal characters and structures that the previous chapter began, as does the last chapter, on Randall Kenan's “Let the Dead Bury Their Dead” (1992) and A Visitation of Spirits (1989), which raises the issue of queer subjects in African American communities and how they have often been violently repressed. All three of these chapters examine the violence and horrors that emanate from patriarchy, complicating any simple black–white binary oppositions, and tying the African American Gothic to the female Gothic in its focus on gendered violence while insisting that “racial injustice inevitably contributes to and overlaps with other oppressions” (257).

All in all, the book is a timely and welcome addition to the field of Gothic studies as well as African American literary studies. Gordon Park's photo of a Washington, DC cleaning woman posing in front of an American flag (clearly signifying on Grant Wood's famous American Gothic) on the front cover signals both the book's interest in grounding the African American Gothic in the historical reality of racism and its overarching concern with the abuse and silencing of African American women, two aspects that might be considered among the defining features of the genre.