SOUTHERN GOTHIC LITERATURE

Southern Gothic don't mess around.  It's the genre that heard you talked a bit of nonsense about its mother, and now it's coming to give you a what-for.  If it's not the book you're reading, it's the book you wish it was.  Southern Gothic is the set of brass knuckles your cousin smuggled into the fist fight.

Some folks may now begin to ask: What the hell is Southern Gothic?

One of the best quotes used to describe the genre came from Prince of Tides author Pat Conroy
(South Carolina): "My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, 'All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister."

Let's break it down.  The Southern part comes easy.  Any of the states which successfully seceded counts, as well as those who were unsuccessful (Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland).  Add a little West Virginia, a dead mule, and a whole lot of attitude and there you have it. 

The Gothic part is a bit trickier.  Gothic was a literary movement born in the mid-eighteenth century that combined horror and romance, while calling attention to the social ills of its time.  Big names of the day were Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and Mary Shelley, of Frankenstein fame. 

Horror brought downriver to the South.  Who can complain about that?

But the "social ills" of the South can make things ... sticky.  There are plenty Southern topics that folks don't discuss in polite company.  Namely race and religion.  But to leave either of those things out of Southern Gothic fiction is to deny the genre its allure.  Also, that pesky little skirmish known as The War Between the States.  It happened.  There were repercussions, as well as resentments.  Every page of the Southern Gothic drips with violence.  And why not?  We write what we know.

After all, this is real Southern, not an issue of Garden & Gun.

There's no point in hiding crazy in Southern Gothic.  Hell, there's no point in hiding crazy in the South.   Somewhere in every Southerner's woodpile is a "grotesque" and it stands out in the fiction to mirror or shine a light on the ills of society.  Flannery O'Connor once said, "Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it's going to be called realistic."
South.  We down here dress up crazy and set it out on the porch with a julep or a glass of sweet tea.  Why hide it in fiction?  In fact, we've given it a name and it's vital to the genre:

But the most spellbinding facet of Southern Gothic fiction is the magical realism.  We're not talking the silliness in the pages of Stephen King's supernatural bestsellers.  No, something macabre and fantastic tickles the imaginations once a reader steps foot among the Spanish moss in the swamps, or crosses the cobblestoned, gas-lit streets of the South.  There's something demented and deranged in the magnolias and chances are, it ain't supernatural.  A HooDoo woman with an itch to scratch.  The restless spirits of town elders looking to protect the citizens from harm ... Is it real or imagined?  Keep turning the pages to find out.

Cypress knees.  A grocery run by the angry town drunk (who happens to be your uncle).  A freak
hurricane come inland years ago and ravaged a town which never recovered.  Cicadas.  Black snakes.  Alligators.  A hoarder with a secret.  A racist living long past his due.

We in the South have our unique settings.  Our own unique set of obstacles.  Our own system of justice.  And our own brand of crazy.

We here in the South call it scenery.

FIVE SOUTHERN GOTHIC WRITERS YOU NEED TO READ RIGHT NOW

 

5. TOM FRANKLIN

Tom Franklin's debut novel Hell at the Breech, a historic fiction account of his home in Clarke County, Alabama, is a gleefully violent tale.  He left his small town and, due to his guilt for Poachers.  But his second novel, Smonk, kindly removes the rules and the brakes.  Although the tone and voice smack more "Western" than Southern, make no mistake: this is Southern Gothic at its finest.  His latest novel, Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, a hat-tip to his neighboring state, is more a foray into the lighter world of Pat Conroy and the New York Times Bestseller list, but it's still quite a read.

"poaching" his upbringing for fiction, published a collection of wonderful short stories aptly titled

RECOMMENDED: Smonk

 

 

4. DANIEL WOODRELL

In Woodrell's Give Us a Kiss, he pens the story of a failed writer who returns to the Ozark hollers where he was raised, only to get involved in old family feuds and schemes.  At the end of a series of violent misadventures, the hero of the novel discovers his "voice" and promises his writing career will be rejuvenated.  Strangely, this seems to mirror the life path of Mr. Woodrell himself.

Although Woodrell had written a handful of novels and stories before his Winter's Bone was adapted into the Oscar nominated film, most all of them had gone out of print.  Despite the fact that his Bayou Trilogy is one of the greatest pieces of fiction ever written, nearly no one had heard of him.  That is hardly the issue any longer.  I don't care what he had to do to find that "voice," or if it was in any way associated with the events described in Give Us a Kiss,  but I'm glad he found it and will read everything he has to follow. 

NOTE: His wife, Katie Estill, has two great, but difficult to find, books as well.

RECOMMENDED: The Bayou Trilogy, "The Echo of Neighborly Bones" from The Outlaw Album

 

3. WILLIAM GAY

In March of 2012, we lost a literary lion.  William Gay did not start writing until very late in his life, but he burst onto the scene with prosaic vengeance.  No one seemed to turn a phrase better than Gay who, in a short span of time, produced some of the most beautifully written examples of Southern Gothic in the canon.  One of the few writers without an MFA, he learned the hard way: by holding a series of different grueling jobs across the South, by practicing, and by late night phone calls with Cormac McCarthy and other writers.  There are entire passages in his novels that are so spectacular and fantastic, they warrant immediate second, third, and even fourth readings.  The Hohenwald, Tennessee writer died of heart failure, and Franklin's moving tribute in the Oxford American will tear up even the hardest of hearts. 

RECOMMENDED: Provinces of Night, I Hate to See the Evening Sun Go Down, The Long Home

 

 

2. CORMAC MCCARTHY

There is a passage in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian: it describes an Indian raid on settlers.  The Natives recently massacred a wedding party and stole their victims' clothes.  The blood-spattered bridal veil, the groom's top hat ... This is their garb as they kill and scalp the unsuspecting settlers.  The scene is brutal.  Visceral.  It is so stunning that when I finished reading the passage of about four pages, only then did I realize I had forgotten to breathe.

That is no lie.  McCarthy weaves devilish plots, then resolves them in a mere sentence.  He creates deranged characters capable of hideous violence, then dispatches them halfway through his book.  His hypnotic prose sets the rules, then changes the rules and no book is ever quite long enough.  He is father to some of th emost depraved characters in history ... or are they the most noble? 

His voice is amazing and, whether set in the borderlands of Texas or the hills of Tennessee, his work is definitively Gothic and quite disturbingly Southern.

RECOMMENDED: Child of God, Outer Dark, The Road, No Country for Old Men, Blood Meridian

 

 

1.  FLANNERY O'CONNOR

No one does it better.  Unfortunate for us, she was hardly prolific.  Lupus claimed the Georgia author at a tragically early age, after writing only two novels and two short story collections.  While she

didn't leave behind a large catalog bearing her name, she spearheaded a movement that birthed writers such as McCarthy and a pantheon of Southern Gothic.  Her shocking and thrilling Southern tales were so steeped in sense of place that it's hard to imagine her ever leaving Georgia.  She tackled matters of religion and race with such brute and brunt force, it's easy to forget the woman was steeped in an extremely devout Catholicism. 

When I first finished her second novel, The Violent Bear it Away, it was the middle of the night.  Well past two.  I hadn't been able to put down the book since before the halfway mark.  I turned off my lamp and lay there in the dark for about a half-hour, my mind unable to think of anything but the chilling mastery I had just read.  Then, after I'd had enough of my own brain, I leaned over, turned back on the lamp, and re-started the book at page one.

It's the only time I've ever done that.

RECOMMENDED: Everything she's ever written.  Even her cartoons.

 

 

My own Southern Gothic tale, "Them Riders," is an update on the events that inspired Robert Penn Warren's first novel, Night Riders.  In 2013, it will be published by New Lit Salon Press in an anthology celebrating the Southern Gothic.  Also, a short film in the Southern Gothic tradition that I wrote, "KEEPSAKE," directed by Meredith Sause, is currently in post-production.  Please refer to my website at erykpruitt.com for updates, as well as my Twitter account.