Are We All Vampires? Gothicism as an Interdisciplinary Tool for Cultural Diagnosis in Gillian Flynn’s <i>Sharp Objects</i>

ABSTRACT Nowadays, Gothicism takes on a form of discourse that is particularly well suited to highlighting contemporary anxieties, especially in such areas as gender, family relations, sexuality, and power structures. It’s a popular choice across different media due to its transhistorical and interdisciplinary nature. This article reviews Gillian Flynn’s novel Sharp Objects (2007) from this particular perspective. The book gained widespread attention in Poland during the time when women’s rights to self-determination were being limited by a right-wing government. The Gothic nature of the book’s world and its parallelism with reality have made it particularly resonant with contemporary Polish women. Therefore, this article uses cultural literary theory, psychoanalysis, and gender studies tools to analyze how Flynn transforms well-known Gothic tropes and motifs, demonstrating how she subverts established cultural expectations around women’s writing, femininity, and motherhood. The concept of vampirism is central to the critical meaning of the text and its derivatives in various versions, including domination, physical and symbolic violence, the uncanny, the legacy of place, blood, and colonial history.