A haunting image from the United Nations, a kind of impending border Gothic:
By 2025, young people on both sides of the border may struggle to understand why their parents' generation built this huge fence.
...the net flow of illegal Mexican immigration northward has slowed to a trickle. With fewer children to support and not yet burdened by a huge surge of elders, the Mexican economy is doing much better than in the past, giving people less reason to leave.
Recall how often Gothic tales site themselves in locations of old, decayed power. Abandoned forts, disused houses, ancient abbeys are where secrets hide, villains skulk, and from which heroines flee, pursued.
America's Gothic has had a creativity tricky time with this, since our built environment isn't as old as Europe's. So we set tales in Europe (cf Poe and Lovecraft's inheritors), fantasize about buildings here, or invent new versions: wilderness sites, haunted houses, or the perennial Indian burial ground.
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