In this episode, I interview University of Iowa PhD candidate Enrico Bruno about his work on Randall Kenan. We discuss the role of mythology in 20th century African American fiction and how the legend of flight appears in Kenan's first novel, A Visitation of Spirits. We then turn to a discussion of Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and ways in which Kenan uses the gothic trope to explore the intersections of race and sexuality in small-town South. We conclude with a bigger question of why the gothic is perhaps America's literary genre of choice and how it relates to the country's political history.