Gothic is dark. The desert is light. Gothic is characterised by ‘an absence of the light associated with sense, security and knowledge’ (Botting 2014, 2). It is cold, clammy, wreathed in fog, and is traditionally set in shadowy castles or decrepit houses full of winding passages, hidden rooms and ancient secrets, heavy draperies and other forms of folded and private spaces. The desert is none of these things. Defined by an intensity of light and a lack of precipitation, while also presenting wide open spaces in which little or no human construction is to be found, ‘Desert Gothic’ may therefore seem oxymoronic. Conceptually, the desert does not lend itself easily to traditional gothic tropes.

If the desert is in general resistant to gothic theorising, a similar sense of imperviousness to gothic can be seen in that historically the desert came late to the gothic colonial canon. With its origins in Europe, later manifestations of gothic outside the European continent could be relied on to replicate at least some of the core characteristics of the original template. American gothic, for instance, may be short on ‘medieval history, ghosts in crumbling castles, emotional extremes, and a debased aristocracy’ (Weinstock 2017, 1). Nevertheless, it ultimately reimagined central gothic figures of darkness and dereliction in novel yet still familiar forms through the by now stock (American) gothic tropes: the cabin in the woods, native American burial grounds, the freak show, the horrors of slavery, and the plantation house (Murphy 2009, 2013; Simmons 2017; Weinauer 2017; Crow 2017). With the desert routinely perceived to exist fully outside of history (rather than in, before or after), such ‘attraction to the imagined vitality of past ages’ (Botting 2014, xiii) was however not so easily transferred to a space that had become ‘a trope, a cipher signifying deficiency, lack, absence’ (Gersdorff 2009, 16). It is telling that early American gothic tales like Nathaniel Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown’ (1835) unfold in the New England woods rather than in the Mojave Desert, just as Edgar Allan Poe's ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839) is set in a damp and dilapidated manor by a tepid lake in what is likely to be New England, rather than next to a salt pan on a sunbaked mesa somewhere in the Southwest. This is reflected in the critical literature, too.